Kensington contacted Mercury with a need to extend their existing Proximo iOS products to Android. The existing iPhone® app was built in-house and relied on native BLE capabilities available in iOS, but for Android things were a bit different.

At that time, Android did not provide any built-in support for BLE, so the team had to rely on a proprietary SDK from Samsung® to deliver the necessary features. The SDK supported only one device - the upcoming flagship Galaxy S4 - and was provided as a pre-release beta version, which was partially unstable making the integration quite complicated.

Another challenge was battery consumption. One of key app features required the app to track signal levels of connected BLE accessories and their geographical location on the map which could easily result in rapid battery drain. As a result, the application had to employ an extremely efficient algorithm to use BLE and GPS data while minimizing its battery footprint.

This called for a team with solid BLE experience and deep understanding of Android internals, so Mercury assigned its leading mobile experts to the task.