Google Releases New App in the Play Store to Measure Distance Between Phones

Google is best known for contributing to the software field, although the giant headquartered in Mountain View (California) had remarkable achievements when it comes to hardware as well. We can remind ourselves about so many apps that Google created and that are crucial for our lives: Waze, Google Maps, Gmail, the search engine, and more.

Google continues its deep involvement in the software area, as those developers who are willing to experiment with Wi-Fi Aware have a new reason to do it, and it’s called ‘WifiNanScan‘.

WifiNanScan measures distances between phones

The WifiNanScan app is the new creation of Google that aims to measure the distance between smartphones, according to 9to5google.com.

Wi-Fi Aware (aka Neighbor Awareness Networking – NAN) allows Android devices to connect directly to each other without another type of connectivity between them.

Google explains exactly on its Play Store page how the new app works:

The WifiNanScan app measures the distance between two smartphones using the Wi-Fi Aware protocol (also called Neighborhood Aware Networking(NAN)). It’s designed as a research, demonstration, and testing tool for developers, vendors, universities, and more. With this app it is possible to obtain a distance measurement with a precision of about 1 meter with phones up to 15 meters apart. Developers, OEMs and researchers can use this tool to validate distance/range measurements enabling the development of peer-to-peer ranging and data transfer, find my phone and context-aware applications based on the WiFi Aware/NAN API. (See also WifiRttScan.)

Google also made some enhancements to Wi-Fi Aware in Android 12, and they include addressing lost connections and efficiency improvements.

WifiNanScancan can be downloaded and installed easily, as it occupies only 6.4MB. Only about 50 people downloaded the app from Google Play, but we can realistically hope for the number to increase tremendously in the next months.