I saw a statement that Google is ending their beacon service
On December 6th we will stop delivering both Eddystone and Physical Web beacon notifications. You will still continue to have access to the beacon dashboard and can deliver proximity based experiences similar to Nearby Notifications via your own apps using our Proximity Beacons API.
But then at the same time they say
The Proximity Beacon API is a part of the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon platform, which also includes Eddystone, an open beacon format from Google. End users should stop encountering Nearby Notifications in early December when Google stops delivering Eddystone and Physical Web beacon notifications. Third-party developers can still send nearby alerts inside their apps with the Proximity Beacons API, but it will no longer be a pervasive system-level functionality.
Can someone interpret what this means for us who are coding beacons Android apps?
Does this mean that at some point, a beacon app will stop working as a device will not be able to receive signals from the beacon device?
Google announced plans to shut down these services on April 1, 2021. I wrote a full blog post on what this means: Eddystone is Dead, Long Live Eddystone!. This means their cloud-based Prioxinity Beacons APIs no longer work.
Prior to this shutdown, Google had in December 2018 turned off another Android beacon feature showing beacon-triggered notifications using Google Play services. This older system used Google Play Services app (pre-installed on most all Android devices outside China except Amazon Kindle Fire tablets) would use the public Google Proximity APIs to detect beacons registered with Google's servers and deliver a notification to users upon detection. This "Nearby" feature effectively allowed delivery of proximity-based marketing and other information without the need to intall a third party app. Predictably, this led to unwanted spam notifications which is why Google discontinued the feature.
Alternative third party SDKs exist for beacon detection like the open source Android Beacon Library. It does not require server registration of beacons, has been around much longer, and will continue to work without any dependency on a company keeping a web service running. This is an alternative if you are worried about Google discontinuing the closed source Google Proximity Beacons API and dependent on specific Google web services.
Full disclosure: I am the lead developer on the Android Beacon Library open source project.