My new experimental app, Job Tracker, has been out in the wild with my beta tester for the past few days and, whilst the feedback has been good, the app is just not working as I expected.
The main problem is that, after a random period of time, it stops picking up the beacons. This is due, I believe, to the fact that Android is killing my monitoring service due to memory pressure and failing to restart it. That or my implementation is utter rubbish. I’m going with the former 🙂
In order to make region monitoring work for beacons, you need to have an Android Service running that actually performs the monitoring. I had originally implemented this as a background service. To try and work around the problem, I’ve made my Monitoring Service run in the foreground and added a Ongoing notification to inform users as such.
This will, I hope, keep the service running for much longer, allowing a better experience for the user. This is just a reminder that iBeacons are certainly an Apple invention and hopefully Android will eventually bake iBeacon support into the OS.
Tomas McGuinness 