Indoor positioning system on IOS 6

Question

My team and I are students and we are currently embarking on a final year project to develop an Indoor positioning system (IPS) mobile application on IOS (IPhones only). Would like to clarify our doubts on certain areas.

1)Is it true that IPhones Apps that calculates the wifi signal strength from access points is still not allowed in app stores?

2) I have seen quite a number of SDKs using Wi-fi triangulation to create IPS for android. Other than redpin which provides open source SDK for IOS, is there other SDKs available to develop IPS on IOS?

Thank you so much.

Answer 1

You can only access Wi-Fi-signals from your app if you jailbreak your device. This is not a good solution of course. We at indoo.rs eventually decided to go for Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi.

We provide an SDK for that, by the way. ;)

Answer 2

1) True 2) AFAIK No.

See this SO answer on outdoor positioning and another SO answer on the Apple80211 private framework to access the WiFi (app rejection if you use it ofc). There are also hardware solutions like Cisco Mobility Services Engine.

WiFiSlam used signal strength + SSID + inertia. They claim to use signal integration with a better algorithm than Kalman. See http://youtu.be/OGdvjvla1Tc#t=1033s They were bought by Apple and now are gone from the Internet, but it seems possible, although complicated, to develop a software only solution for indoor positioning.

Another thing, even when you set kCLLocationAccuracyBestForNavigation but the position is still all over the place when compared to a GPS unit. See http://web.archive.org/web/20110912081330/http://rnr.davidlokshin.com/post/825290568

Answer 3

1) True. There are no public APIs that supply signal strength. (The only info that can be gathered with public APIs is the SSID of the currently connected Wi-Fi network.)

2) I don't know.