so lately as i have been testing builds and trying to perfect the app, i’d been seeing some weird things, especially wrt beacon recognition. it just seemed to be failing too often to be acceptable. in the back of my head doubts started to creep in. maybe the beacon tech just wasn’t as solid as it needed to be? maybe payfrit just really wasn’t that great?
so last night i really started digging into things. built an app specifically to test what beacons a phone could see, their rssi, etc. had to get to the bottom of them was going on.
luckily i had three android phones with me on the vacation. the biggest single thing i learned from the test was that the bluetooth radio on my daily driver that i had been using for most of my recent testing, was wonky af.
needless to say the relief factor at learning that was just massive. in fact i had already started tweaking the app to try to make beacon detection better, essentially by making it slower. but before i made too many changes i decided to look into that test app. some decisions are bigger than others.