Mimicking NFC with iBeacon: plausible? appropriate?

Question

I'm creating an app in which a key piece is transferring data when two people press a button on the app on their respective devices and then press their phones together (Yes, Bump on Android does this. That isn't the point). I know I could use NFC on Android to get this done. However, I wouldn't be able to do this on iOS because iOS doesn't support NFC. Earlier today I read about and discovered iBeacon, which is apparently some Bluetooth 4.0 implementation that works with both iPhones and Android devices. I've read about retail use-cases of iBeacon, where stores could set up beacons and when users walk by or are close enough, it'll trigger an action. Is the use-case of mimicking NFC for my purposes to be able to do reach iPhone users plausible? Should I be using another solution? Is this not the purpose of iBeacon and it wouldn't work?

Answer 1

From my experience with iBeacon on Android, you can indeed use it to replace NFC, as there are 3 'ranges' (immediate, near and far). iBeacon is based off BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and very light on power consumption as the name would suggest.

If you are trying to trigger actions on devices in a certain vicinity, i'd say using iBeacon is the most plausable method.

Android doesn't natively support 'iBeacon' as Apple created it, but it is based off Blueooth 4.0, a library has been created to mimick the iOS implementation of iBeacon

Android iBeacon Library

One thing to note, is that when using iBeacons, you cannot transmit data. Only two numbers (a major, and minor) and a UUID used solely for identification purposes.

Answer 2

The main problem with using iBeacons for this is that iBeacons are transmit only devices designed only to alert phones to their presence. The technology cannot exchange data.

You could do something like you describe with low-level programming with Bluetooth LE technologies, but iBeacons alone cannot do the job.