We started BeaconGo straight after Apple announced the iBeacon standard in 2013. We had a whole set of iBeacon enabled apps and hardware. We were making GPS based Geo-location apps back then and iBeacon was aimed at solving the indoor location problem. Was a buzzword back then. But never really took off and indoor locations is still generally unsolved. Google been playing around with visual positioning to solve indoor location, HTC and Oculus AR/VR glasses use fixed base stations, etc, but no universal standard yet.
iBeacons are still the only viable cross platform for some level of indoor location tracking. With a clever system of multiple iBeacons configured properly, it can do a pretty decent job of relative location indoors. Whilst iBeacons are largely BLE Beacons like Eddystone and other standards, Apple only support iBeacons at the system level. So if you want to have a cross platform solution, it is best to broadcast in iBeacon compatible standard.
Back in 2013, they didn’t really design these beacons with data privacy or security in mind. They were mainly broadcasting these messages out in plaintext and can be easily faked or cloned. For non-essential or non-critical systems, it is good enough and seamless to users. No pairing needed, just need to enable it as you first run the app on your iPhone. Another problem with iBeacon is that it doesn’t have directional information and limited distance/range approximation. With Ultra-Wideband, hopefully Apple will one day have another crack at solving this, but unfortunately, it is not part of the Bluetooth standard so it is unlikely that all Android Phones will have Ultra-Wideband any time soon. Back to square one, BLE beacons. Hence why we are keeping this site alive for now.
If you have any questions about using iBeacon, feel free to contact us. We do app consulting. 🙂 team@beacongo.com