Universal-Physical-Web

Physical Web Scanner for FxOS (using native implementation) and Cordova (using evothings plugin)

About the app

The idea is having an app that can work in any mobile device that scans BLE Physical Web Devices and that can be used in different ways:

• As a device scanner in which the devices are listed (parameter showClosestDevice configured to false in index.js)
• As an URL opener, that opens the URL of the closest Physical Web Device (parameter showClosestDevice configured to true in index.js)

The URL to be used for every Physical Web Device again can be of 2 types:

• The URL directly stored in the device. (parameter showDeviceUrl in index.js is configured to true)
• A URL stored in Firebase (together with some extra information), the URL in the device is just a pointer to the Firebase URL (kind of proxy). This is the configuration used when parameter showDeviceUrl in index.js is false.

Supported Platforms

FirefoxOS

For doing so, you need to generate a build with the patches available in Bug 933357

Once you have a build with the proper BLE support you can just install the app available at the www folder that already includes everything that is required: manifest, icons, code, etc...

Android and iOS

The code of the WebApp is exactly the same, but it relies in Cordova in order to make it a native app (this is required until Android or iPHone include a WebAPI for Bluetooth). Apart from Cordova a BLE pluging is required as well as some other plugins describe below.

Making it work in Android and iOS

Clone the repo and install the target platform(s)

$ cordova platform add ios
$ cordova platform add android

After that you need to install the required plugins:

$ cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.inappbrowser
$ cordova plugin add https://github.com/evothings/cordova-ble.git
$ cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.console

And build it for the target platforms:

$ cordova build ios
$ cordova build android

After that you can install the apps in your Android or iOS devices.

For instance, in the case of Android:

$ adb install platforms/android/ant-build/CordovaApp-debug.apk