Create features based on proximity
Nearby Messages exposes simple publish and subscribe methods that rely on proximity. Your app publishes a payload that can be received by nearby subscribers. On top of this foundation, you can build a variety of user experiences to share messages, create real-time connections between nearby devices, and receive beacon messages.
Nearby Connections enables your app to easily discover other devices on a local network, connect, and exchange messages in real-time. Use Nearby Connections to create multiplayer and multi-screen experiences.
Nearby Notifications is a new feature allowing developers to tie an app or website to a BLE beacon and create contextual notifications, even with no app installed.
Nearby Messages
Allow your users to find nearby devices and share messages in a way that’s as frictionless as a conversation. This enables rich interactions such as collaborative editing, forming a group, voting, or broadcasting a resource.
The Nearby Messages API is available for Android and iOS (beta), allowing for seamless cross-platform experiences.
Nearby Connections
Discover other devices on a local network and create connections that enable real-time cross-device experiences.
This is especially useful for local multiplayer gaming so that one player can set up a local multiplayer game and let other players on the network join it, as well as multi-screen gaming to use a phone or tablet as a game controller to play games displayed on a nearby large-screen device, such as Android TV.
Nearby Notifications
Preview: Nearby Notifications is an upcoming feature in Android for contextual discovery. Associate your website or app with beacons, to provide low-priority notifications when scanned by devices that are nearby.