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
Discover and exchange information with other devices, without having to be on the same local network. Nearby Messages enables seamless nearby interactions such as multiplayer gaming, realtime collaboration, forming a group, broadcasting a resource, or sharing content.
The Nearby Messages API is available for Android and iOS, and enables communication between the two platforms.
Nearby Connections
Discover other devices on the same local network and create connections for 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 large-screen device, such as Android TV.
Nearby Notifications
Nearby Notifications is an Android feature which enables contextual discovery. Associate your website or app with beacons, to provide low-priority notifications when scanned by devices that are nearby.