Today we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve updated both the Estimote SDK and Estimote App for Android. We overhauled both and they’re ready for action! The biggest update is integration with Estimote Cloud, which should alleviate many security concerns and simplify your life when it comes to managing your beacons. The updates are available on GitHub and in Google Play.
Enter Estimote Cloud
The latest version of our Android SDK (version 0.6) introduces Estimote Cloud integration and cloud-based authentication. This means that you need to provide your app ID and token to be able to connect to your beacons. It prevents unauthorized access and saves any changes made to beacon settings in the cloud. You’ll be able to immediately see them take effect in the Estimote Cloud dashboard. The new SDK also enables you to update the firmware of your beacons to the latest version: 3.0.1. We highly recommend keeping your beacons’ firmware up to date. The latest version not only enables much tighter security for your beacon network, but also brings cool features like conditional broadcasting. You can read in detail about the new firmware elsewhere on our blog.
The updated SDK is available on GitHub.
The changes above apply to the Android version of our app too. It now features cloud integration and will require you to log in to your Estimote Account to be able to make any changes to beacon settings. If you don’t have an account yet, it takes just a moment to sign up for one. The app also allows you to update your beacons’ firmware.
You can download the app from Google Play.
Take note
If you’ve been using our Android tools to date, a critical thing to note: if you have used them to change the IDs (UUID, Major, Minor values) of your beacons, those beacons are currently desynchronized with Estimote Cloud. We strongly recommend putting them back in sync.
To do so, please connect to each beacon with the new Android app. It will prompt you to reset the ID to the factory settings. After you do that, you’ll be able to adjust UUID, Major, and Minor to your liking once again. It’s a one-time issue stemming from the fact that the Android app and SDK were not integrated with cloud before. After you synchronize your beacons with Estimote Cloud, you won’t need to do it again.
Coming soon
This is just the first in a series of updates that are coming to our Android tools. In the near future we’ll ship many more features we’ve already introduced for the iOS platform. This includes, among others, Estimote Stickers detection, sensor data support, and deeper integration with Estimote Cloud. And if you want to learn more about our tools for Android developers, don’t hesitate to ask on the Estimote Community Forums or by tweet and email.