Nearby Glasses

my PocketPC GmbH

About this app

Smart glasses are becoming more and more parts of our daily encounters. However, they are often not easy to distinguish from regular eyewear. This app looks for their Bluetooth identification (Company Identifiers in the BTLE advertising frame, ADV_INV). It displays a notification when smart glasses may be nearby (distance may be customised), hence you may act accordingly.
In Canary Mode, the bird hides when smart glasses may be nearby. You can switch the mode in the app's settings.
Persmissions:
The app needs permissions to use Bluetooth and to set Foreground services (if you enable this under settings).
Furthermore, for Bluetooth LE, it is mandatory to get permissions for location services. However, app does not record your location at all! you can look into it's source code if you want. It is just a requirement by Android to have location permissions when you deal with BLE device recognition features.

For more details, please see:
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses

This app is free, open source, does not track you and does not contain ads or other nuisances. May it be useful.



App Icon: The icon is based on Eyeglass icons created by Freepik - Flaticon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/eyeglass
License: This app Nearby Glasses is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 license: https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses/blob/main/LICENSE
Canary: The canary drawings are made by me and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I provided them as raw svg files (done in InkScape) and converted to xml, obviously, for the app's resources

Ratings and reviews

I only give 3 stars because once you leave the screen it's very hard to get it to come back up so you can stop scanning. Also it will give multiple alerts for the same device. I'm a substitute teacher and I'm not interested in being in some kids tik tok so I use the app to scan for recording glasses. If I find one I stay out of that person's view. It helps protect my privacy.

I set a routine so every time I leave my Wi-Fi it automatically opens up and I just have to press one button to turn on. I set the routine to have a most annoying sound so it catches my attention but people on social media have been telling me to play copyrighted music Michael Jackson, Disney something like that so they can't play the video. it was easy simple useful it's gone off multiple times but I'm on the Vegas strip when it goes off so it's normal there kind of.

It requires location to be on to scan. You shouldn't need that just to see Bluetooth device identifiers. I'm trying to gain *more* privacy, not *lose* more. And it doesn't seem to have always-on scanning either, which is a feature I hoped for. Giving it 2 stars instead of 1 only because if the scan at least works, it will help some people.

What’s new

- Turkish translation added
- minor bugfixes
See https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses/ for full changelog