What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.63
One fix, a big one: phones and beacons were invisible to the Bluetooth proxy on every Android 12+ device, and now they are not. Note the one-time Location grant below if your proxy runs on Android 12 or newer.
Fixed: Phones and beacons are no longer invisible to the proxy on Android 12 and newer
- The proxy scanned with Android's neverForLocation flag, and Android 12+ honors that flag by silently stripping every location-inferable beacon frame, iBeacon and Eddystone alike, from scan results: exactly the traffic a Bermuda or iBeacon presence setup needs relayed (#246). Phones were invisible to every modern proxy device while ESP32 proxies and Android 11 devices heard them fine, and nothing anywhere reported it, since every other advertisement flowed normally.
- Reproduced and verified live: a phone transmitting Home Assistant's BLE transmitter beacon, sitting next to a tablet that could not hear it, appeared within seconds of the fix, and Bermuda now tracks it through that kiosk.
One-time action after updating on Android 12+
- Android ties Bluetooth scanning to Location when beacon traffic is involved, so the proxy now needs the Location permission and the device's location switch on, on every Android version. Until granted, the proxy cannot scan at all on Android 12+.
- The ESPHome page's Required system permissions group now shows two rows, Nearby devices and Location, each saying exactly what is missing; one tap on Grant walks through the permission dialogs and opens the location settings screen if the system switch is what is off. The app never reads the device's position; the grant only unlocks Android's scan delivery.