iBeacon, AltBeacon, *Beacon: What interoperability is legal, and permitted on iOS and Android?

Question

I want to support only one Beacon standard if possible, and have the device itself act is the "host/beacon", and other devices the "listener".

I'm supporting Android, iOS, and possibly Windows phone using Xamarin.

Is any interoperability supported between iOS and android?

Answer 1

Check this library to give you some guidance.

https://github.com/AltBeacon/android-beacon-library

It allows Android devices to use beacons much like iOS devices do. An app can request to get notifications when one or more beacons appear or disappear. An app can also request to get a ranging update from one or more beacons at a frequency of approximately 1Hz.

You can also find more information on this blog: http://vincenth.net/blog/archive/2014/04/24/building-cross-platform-ibeacon-apps-for-ios-android-and-windows-with-c-and-xamarin.aspx

Answer 2

The AltBeacon standard is precisely designed to allow the interoperability you suggest. It supports using the same 16/2/2 byte identifier scheme. Radius Networks (my company) sells RadBeacon USB units that have a dual advertisement that interleaves an AltBeacon transmission with an iBeacon transmission. This allows you to set up the beacon once with a single identifier scheme and use the AltBeacon advertisement for detection on Android devices and the iBeacon advertisement for detection on iOS devices. The open source Android Beacon Library 2.0 allows Android to get full beacon functionality similar to CoreLocation on iOS.

This is the most conservative approach for interoperability, because it does not rely on using Apple's iBeacon technology on Android devices. That said, Android devices are technically capable of detecting and decoding iBeacon signals. Configuring the Android Beacon Library to do this brings up issues of intellectual property that I am not qualified to answer.

For Windows devices, the operating system does not allow for detecting Bluetooth LE beacons as of Windows 8.1 (either mobile or desktop versions). This is expected to change in Windows 10, but that will not come until late 2015.