I programmed a service for the teachers of a school a tool which they can use to automate their classroom. For easier access, i want to implement authentication via URL. The teacher WLAN is on a seperate subnet than the others. The URL is a subdomain of a domain I own and added a SSL certificate. Now I am ready to deploy some beacons for test purposes and I noticed that Google Chrome won't show the beacons with my internal URL. URLs like google.com and facebook.com work just fine. The physical Web browser app recognizes the internal URL.
What should I do?
Unfortunately, you cannot use Chrome to display physical web URLs pointing to a private subnet. Part of the Chrome system is a server-side component hosted at Google that checks the URL, validates that it resolves, and pulls metadata about the page it points to. If the page is not accessible on the open Internet, this check will fail and Chrome will silently ignore the physical web URL transmitted by the beacon.
While you cannot use Chrome to display such URLs, you can display them in your own custom app using detection SDKs like the Android Beacon Library.