Beacon is a an open-source social network and accompanying Android app that allows you to anonymously share interesting things and events with people in your local community. Beacon is still in active development, but when finished, using Beacon will be something like this:

Users take a picture in-app. Beacon takes a geotag and posts it on the map. Beacons that are more popular are indicated on the map. You can select a beacon to see what people are saying about it and to add your own comment.

A video demonstrating the current functionality can be found here.

Apk's can be downloaded here.

Beacon was started as a university project and as such, is not currently open for pull requests. In January 2016, however, Beacon will become open for contributions.

Configuring the Frontend

In order to build the frontend, you need to configure several values. The first is the URL of the backend. Create a file at the project root named beacon.properties and add the following line

ServerURL=SERVER_URL

And replace the string SERVER_URL with your actual URL. Next, you'll need a server client ID from Google in order to authenticate with the Google sign-in API.

Add the following line to beacon.properties.

ServerClientID=ID_STRING
DebugServerClientID=ID_STRING

And replace the string ID_STRING with your personal ID. It should end in apps.googleusercontent.com. You can find directions for obtaining such an ID here.

Authenticating with Google Sign-In

Creating a configuration file at app/google-services.json is necessary for authenticating with Google's Sign-In api and, therefore for the app itself. Follow the directions here to get a configuration file of your own. We have experienced trouble with the Google Services libraries and emulators, so it is recommended that you develop using a physical device.

Signing the Frontend

You don't need to set up a keystore in order to create a debug build, but in order to take advantage of authentication services like Facebook and Google, the key of the apk must match the key registered with Facebook or Google.

In order to build a signed release apk, there are several steps you must take after cloning the repository. Add the following lines to beacon.properties.

keyStore=release.keystore
keyStorePassword=PASSWORDA
keyAlias=BeaconReleaseKey
keyAliasPassword=PASSWORDB

This will allow gradle to access your keystore, which you will now generate. Run the following command at the project root.

keytool -genkey -v -keystore release.keystore -alias BeaconReleaseKey -keyalg
RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

The command will prompt you for information. What you enter is not important for a development build, except that the passwords you provide must match those that you entered in the release.properties file.

This will generate a keystore file at release.keystore.