We released a couple large features in the last couple of days. Polygon geofences support, a new beta version of our Android plugin and support for filtering notifications on Cordova and Phonegap.
Polygon geofences
A feature that was requested by a large group of customers was the support for polygon geofences. That feature is now implemented. It is straight away for all customers on both iOS and Android. Use cases include surrounding a whole mall or even a whole city. We’re curious to see what you come up with.
Just as you would for normal circular geofences you can create polygon geofences straight from the dashboard. On the bottom left of the map view you can change the mode to “polygon”. After changing the mode to polygon you can start drawing your polygon by placing point on the map. The last placed point is automatically connected to the first point.
To yield the best results we recommend to keep the shapes simple and not to include too much detail. For compatibility with our current plugin versions, it will reduce the polygon to a single circle. In the future we will improve the polygon support of the plugins further. You can already create the polygons now and in the future benefit from the improved accuracy when a new plugin has been integrated.
Beta version of Android Plugin
The new version of our android plugin is new available as Beta. We released a couple weeks ago an alpha version of the plugin, but now we think it is good enough to mark it as Beta.
We have been working the last couple months to create a new version of our Android plugin. During the design of this plugin we worked hard to make use of the latest features related to location accuracy and battery efficiency. Also the integration of the plugin has become a little bit easier. Please let us know what you think of this version. For more information, see our previous release notes.
Want to try it out? You can download the AAR file from the Developer Tools page in the dashboard. The guide is available here. In the future the library should also be available from a repository, so you no longer have to copy the library files yourself. The library is no longer available as a separate JAR file, only as an AAR package. This library is not yet available for Phonegap/Cordova/Ionic, Appcelerator Titanium and Xamarin yet.
Remote notification filter for Cordova and Phonegap
For our Phonegap customers it is now possible to have a remote notification filter. Due to platform limitations it isn’t possible to filter directly in javascript. Instead a remote HTTPS endpoint can be specified where the notifications that are about to be shown to the user are sent.
You can find more information about this feature on our Github page.
When writing apps using our plugin directly in Java or Objective-C/Swift, we recommend doing the filtering directly on the phone. This is more reliable, more battery efficient. You have access to the local app database as well.