The Physical Web Cometh

At last week’s AndroidPhilly event, I was surprised to find a lock screen notification for a “Physical Web Page” on my phone

Tapping on that notification linked to an explanation page of the Physical Web pages and then a link to Nick Dipatri’s BLE geo-fencing app.

This was the first time I have seen the Physical Web pages in action, though Google has talked about them for a while. While not a lot of people talk about iOS’s iBeacons much anymore (compared to the rage they were when they were announced), the Physical Web pages approach is different with Google Chrome being the receiver app that detects the beacons and notifies the user. This is great for developers who don’t have to worry about having their app installed but also means users wont be able to skip notifications from services they don’t care for.  Bundling the beacon technology within Chrome also means that the Google approach is more cross platform and will work on multiple devices.

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves in the next few years.

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur