Category: Android

iBeacon App Development Considerations

If you are considering writing apps to communicate with iBeacons, here are some high level things you need to think about that are specific to beacon app development:

  • Detecting whether Location and Bluetooth are on/off and alerting the user for permission to use these
  • Detecting beacons in background when the iOS app is closed or the Android app is in doze mode
  • On Android, taking account of the various Bluetooth APIs that exist for the different Android releases
  • Fetching data, associated with a beacon, from a service, such that it’s cached and not fetched every time
  • Arranging for some initial data bundled with the app so that it works straight away without a data connection
  • Fetching data before it is needed such that it’s available with no delay and when there’s no network connection
  • Re-fetching of data when it becomes stale
  • Fetching metadata from the server to control the behaviour of triggering
  • Arranging how Apple will test the app for app review otherwise complications will arise and the review will take weeks
  • Assessing whether to use the mobile OS or manufacturer supplied SDKs (or both)
  • If connecting to beacons, taking account of the unreliability of wireless connections
  • Collecting and uploading statistics/analytics to assess usage
  • Providing end user diagnostics to aid support troubleshooting

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Each Beacon Manufacturer Has its Own App

Each Bluetooth beacon manufacturer typically provides its own proprietary configuration app for several key reasons. Firstly, manufacturers use different internal components and designs, meaning a custom app is necessary to tailor configuration options specifically to the hardware. Many also implement proprietary Bluetooth communication protocols for setup, requiring a unique app to handle these configurations correctly.

Security is another factor, as manufacturers often include measures to prevent unauthorised reconfiguration, and custom apps allow for the necessary authentication and encryption. Customisation also allows manufacturers to highlight unique features that may not be available in generic tools, while a branded app ensures control over the look, feel and overall user experience during configuration.

Some beacons only permit configuration within a limited timeframe after being powered on or require a special mode to be enabled and custom apps are designed to accommodate these specific procedures. Firmware updates are also often delivered through these apps, while support and troubleshooting features, including diagnostic tools and links to support resources, are commonly integrated.

For beacons that store data locally, custom apps offer interfaces to manage that data according to manufacturer-specific formats. While universal configuration tools are theoretically possible, the wide variety of hardware, protocols and features in use makes them difficult to develop, and manufacturer-specific apps remain the most reliable way to fully manage proprietary beacon hardware.

What Bluetooth Systems Can Track Working Using Their Smartphones?

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not possible to directly track smartphones using Bluetooth alone. Both iOS and Android devices have built-in privacy protections and limitations that prevent this kind of tracking.

For iOS devices, Apple has implemented randomised MAC addresses for Bluetooth transmissions. This means that the unique identifier broadcast by an iPhone or iPad changes regularly, making it impossible to consistently track a specific device over time. Android doesn’t continuously send out Bluetooth transmissions.

However, whilst smartphones themselves can’t be directly tracked via Bluetooth, there are systems that can perform location tracking using Bluetooth beacons and gateways. These systems rely on people carrying small Bluetooth beacons, often in the form of keyfobs or badges, which broadcast a unique identifier. Fixed gateway devices are then installed throughout an area to detect these beacons.

When a gateway detects a beacon, it records the beacon’s identifier and signal strength to infer distance, along with a timestamp. By combining data from multiple gateways, the system can estimate the location of the beacon, and by extension the person carrying it, within the covered area. This approach is often used in workplace settings for things like occupancy monitoring or contact tracing.

It’s important to note that these systems require active participation – people must choose to carry the beacon devices. This is quite different from the idea of passively tracking smartphones without user consent.

Some retailers have experimented with using Bluetooth beacons to track customers’ movements within stores. However, this still requires customers to have the store’s app installed and Bluetooth enabled on their phones. These work the other way around by having fixed beacons and the app detecting the beacons. It’s not a covert tracking system, but rather one that customers opt into, often in exchange for discounts or other benefits. It’s less reliable due to the nuances of ensuring the app runs on all phones, at all times.

In summary, whilst it’s not possible to directly track smartphones via Bluetooth due to privacy protections and limitations, there are Bluetooth-based systems that can provide location based services when users actively participate.

Using Beacons with Smartphone Apps

Bluetooth beacons are a powerful tool for creating personalised experiences through mobile apps. They work by transmitting signals that can be detected by all smartphones. When a user comes within range, the app detects the beacon’s signal and identifies the user’s proximity to a specific location.

This enables the delivery of contextually relevant content, such as detailed information or reviews when a customer approaches a product in a retail store. It also allows for personalised recommendations based on a user’s location and past behaviour, offering tailored suggestions that match their interests.

Interactive experiences are another feature made possible by Bluetooth beacons. They can trigger app-specific actions based on user location, such as providing wait times and virtual queuing options in an amusement park. Additionally, they assist in wayfinding and navigation within large venues by providing directions and highlighting points of interest.

Utilising Bluetooth beacons for personalised experiences benefits businesses in numerous ways. They enable enhanced engagement with customers by delivering timely content, fostering a stronger connection and loyalty. They improve customer satisfaction by providing tailored information and recommendations, making customers feel more valued. Sales and conversion rates are also boosted by offering targeted promotions when customers are near specific products.

Bluetooth beacons gather valuable data that provides insights into customer preferences and behaviour, helping businesses optimise operations and make data-driven decisions to enhance their offerings and marketing strategies.

Android and iOS use included operating system APIs to detect Bluetooth beacons. When an Android application detects a beacon, it gets a callback to a function including the signal level (RSSI), where developers can specify the app’s operation. On iOS the framework includes classes to represent beacons and beacon regions, enabling monitoring and ranging, i.e., determining the approximate distance to a beacon. When an app registers to monitor a specific beacon region, iOS notifies the app if the device enters or exits that region. This happens even if the app isn’t running at the time. Furthermore, if the app is currently in use, it can continually receive updates about nearby beacons and their relative distance.

In both Android and iOS, the apps don’t connect with the beacons. Instead, they detect the Bluetooth signals that the beacons broadcast. Also, both systems require the user’s permission for the app to access Bluetooth and location services.

Which Beacons Transmit a MAC Address?

A MAC (Media Access Control) address is a hardware identification number that uniquely identifies each device. In the context of Bluetooth, a MAC address is used to identify a specific Bluetooth device, such as a smartphone, headset or a Bluetooth beacon. All beacons transmit a Bluetooth MAC Address which is a 48-bit address usually represented in hexadecimal format like this: 0123456789AB.

All devices such as smartphones can see the incoming MAC addresses that are sent as part of the device discovery stage rather than the main Bluetooth LE advertising payload. iOS is a bit strange and non-standard because it hides detected Bluetooth MAC address from apps, and hence from users, when detecting beacons and other Bluetooth devices.

No such restriction happens on Android or any other device. The rationale is probably that Apple wants you to use their ids, the iBeacon UUID, major and minor or the Peripheral Id rather than the MAC address. Apple also probably think they are protecting privacy in some way. A few beacons and other devices such as sensors and fitness trackers additionally put the MAC address into the advertising payload which circumvents Apple’s restrictions and allows reading of the MAC address by apps.

Can I Use My Phone as Bluetooth Beacon?

A question that often arises is, “Can I use my phone as a Bluetooth beacon?” The answer is ‘yes’.

Before we get into the details, it’s essential to understand what a Bluetooth beacon is. In simple terms, a Bluetooth beacon is a small wireless device that transmits a periodic signal to other Bluetooth-enabled devices within its range. This technology is often used for indoor positioning, sensing and other location-based services.

Technically, yes, a smartphone can function as a Bluetooth beacon. Both Android and iOS platforms offer apps to turn your phone into a beacon transmitter. However, there are some caveats.

Using your phone as a Bluetooth beacon can be a significant drain on your battery. Beacons are designed to be low-energy devices that can run for years on a single battery. Your phone, on the other hand, has many other functions that consume power, so using it as a beacon will lead to the need for frequent charging.

The range of a dedicated Bluetooth beacon can be up to 100 metres, depending on the model and settings. A smartphone’s Bluetooth range is generally much shorter, limiting its effectiveness as a beacon.

While there are apps such as Locate Beacon, Beacon Simulator (for iOS), Beacon Simulator, nRFConnect (for Android) that can turn your phone into a beacon, these are often not as reliable or feature-rich as dedicated beacon hardware. You won’t be able to change all the settings such as power, advertising period and advertising type as you would with a dedicated hardware beacon. Additionally, running such an app in the background may interfere with other phone functions and some phones eventually close long running services.

Despite these limitations, there are scenarios where using your phone as a Bluetooth beacon could be useful. If you’re a developer or a business looking to experiment with beacon technology, using a phone can be a cost-effective way to test your ideas before investing in dedicated devices.

While it’s possible to use your phone as a Bluetooth beacon, it’s generally not the most efficient or reliable method for most applications. However, for personal use or small-scale use, it can serve as a convenient alternative. If you’re considering implementing beacon technology on a larger scale, investing in inexpensive dedicated hardware is usually the better option.

View Bluetooth beacons

Reverse Engineering iBeacon and Eddystone Bluetooth GATT Services

For some of our beacons such the manufacturers haven’t documented their Bluetooth Service Characteristics. This means that while they are ok for scanning/proximity type applications, you can’t write your own app to, for example, change programmatically the UUID, major and minor, transmit power, advertising period and must rely on the manufacturer’s configuration app. While this of no consequence for the majority of uses that set and forget settings, more ambitious scenarios might want directly access the Bluetooth GATT services to change settings.

Uri Shaked has a great article on Medium on how to Reverse Engineer a Bluetooth Lightbulb. His method uses the developer logging in Android 4.4 and later to allow inspection of the Bluetooth packets and hence the Bluetooth Services and Characteristics that are being used. This method can equally be used with iBeacon and Eddystone beacons to reverse engineer the Bluetooth GATT information.

Another method is to use a Bluetooth sniffer. This listens in on the Bluetooth communication between two devices. One way of doing this is with Nordic Semiconductor’s Sniffer software on a dongle. There’s a tutorial on JimmyIoT.

It’s usually ill-advised to reverse engineer interfaces to discover undocumented features because the manufacturer can change the implementation thus breaking your solution. However, it’s very rare that firmware is ever updated in beacons and when it is, it’s usually only to fix bugs rather than change the implementation.

Processing on Bluetooth Device or Smartphone?

There’s often a dilemma when creating Bluetooth systems whether to place the processing on the smartphone or on the Bluetooth device.

The efficient and accurate prediction of an individual’s heart rate using wearable devices is crucial for various personal care applications. A new study Energy-efficient Wearable-to-Mobile Offload of Machine Learning Inference for Photoplethysmogram-based Heart-Rate Estimation (pdf) from the Universita di Bologna, Italy, looks into the trade-offs between carrying out heart rate tracking on the device itself or delegating the work to a mobile device.

The research introduces CHRIS, an inference system that uses the interconnectedness between a smartwatch and a smartphone. This system assesses the balance between energy consumption and heart rate tracking error. Depending on the connection status, a user-specified error, energy constraints and an estimate of the input difficulty, CHRIS employs two heart rate prediction algorithms. These are executed on either the smartwatch or the phone.

CHRIS showed the potential to achieve up to 2.03 times energy reduction on the smartwatch by deferring processing off the smartwatch, without a reduction on the tracking accuracy.

The Advantage of iBeacon over Eddystone and AltBeacon

iBeacon, Eddystone and AltBeacon are the three main beacon technologies. All of them use the standard Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) advertising format. Bluetooth LE is designed for short bursts of radio that uses little power and is therefore suitable for battery operation. Each of the advertising variants uses a unique advertising packet format that defines what kind of data the beacon transmits.

iBeacon, launched by Apple in 2013, was the first to adopt this technology and created a new wave in proximity services. It uses a simple advertising format, which consists of a UUID (universally unique identifier), Major, and Minor identifiers.

Eddystone, introduced by Google in 2015, offers a more complex advertising packet format with four different frame types: Eddystone-UID (similar to iBeacon’s UUID), Eddystone-URL (broadcasting web address), Eddystone-TLM (telemetry information about the beacon itself), and Eddystone-EID (an encrypted version of Eddystone-UID for secure applications).

Altbeacon, an open-source specification introduced by Radius Networks, provides a simpler format similar to iBeacon.

The functionality of beacon technologies are different on iOS and Android due to differences in the operating systems themselves. Apple’s strict app guidelines and strong emphasis on user privacy limit the ability of apps to perform tasks in the background. For instance, iOS only allows apps to scan for iBeacon formatted advertisements in the background using the CoreLocation library, not CoreLocation. Eddystone or AltBeacon can only be read in background using CoreLocation. Android offers more flexibility for background tasks and can work with iBeacon, Eddystone and Altbeacon.

Although Eddystone and Altbeacon have their merits, iBeacon is the advertising of choice for most scenarios involving smartphone apps due to the integration with iOS.

How to See Bluetooth LE Advertising on Android and iOS

To see Bluetooth LE advertising on smartphones, you can use a Bluetooth scanner app. These apps are available from the App Store and Google Play Store and can be downloaded and installed on your smartphone.

To use a Bluetooth scanner app, follow these steps:

  1. Open the App Store Google Play Store on your device and search for “Bluetooth scanner” or “Bluetooth advertising”.
  2. Select a Bluetooth scanner app that you want to use and install it on your device. nRFConnect is a well-known scanner, provided by Nordic Semiconductor, the manufacturer of the Bluetooth System-on-chip in most beacons.
  3. Once the app is installed, open it and enable Bluetooth on your device, if it is not already enabled.
  4. The app will scan for nearby Bluetooth devices that are broadcasting advertising packets. It will display a list of the devices it finds, along with their names and other information.
  5. You can tap on a device in the list to see more details about it, such as its Bluetooth address (only on Android), signal strength, and any advertising data that it is broadcasting.

In summary, using a Bluetooth scanner app is a simple and effective way to see Bluetooth advertising on an smartphones. These apps allow you to see the devices that are broadcasting advertising packets, as well as the data that they are transmitting.