Back in 2015, Google introduced a new feature called Nearby Notifications. The feature was supposed to show you notifications based on your location and what you could find in your vicinity – places like free Wi-Fi hotspots, museums or information about bus times.
It was supposed to be a user-friendly information guide but, unfortunately, it became a target for spam and, more often than not, it was sending unhelpful notifications to the users’ phones.
In the past year, spam and overall irrelevant information over-saturated the feature and Google opted out of finding a way to spam and filter the content and decided to just discontinue it altogether.
“[…] earlier this year, we noticed a significant increase in locally irrelevant and spammy notifications that were leading to a poor user experience. While filtering and tuning can help, in the end, we have a very high bar for the quality of content that we deliver to users, especially content that is delivered through notifications. Ultimately, we have determined these notifications did not meet that bar.”
– Ritesh Nayak M., Google Product Manager
Developers will still have access to the feature by implementing it into their apps as well as to the beacon dashboard. The proximity-based notifications like the Nearby Notifications will still be a part of the Google Proximity Beacons API.
Users will stop receiving notifications from the feature starting December 6th.
Follow TechTheLead on Google News to get the news first.
