CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiosibeacon
Marcelo Ribeiro
Marcelo Ribeiro

Reputation: 1738

Beacon Notifications on iOS / Android

Ok, I am starting to develop a new app but I do need to know if it is possible before I begin. I have no experience with iBeacons, beacons or anything BLE related so please forgive my ignorance here.

Problem: I want to use my Mac Bluetooth and send a BLE notification to my iPhone and my Android phones (think of the Starbucks app and how it sends you a Beacon). Question is: Is it possible for my iOS SDK / Android SDK (is there any kind of delegate or API) that will receive my BLE notification and open a specific app based on that? In other words, my Mac would send a simple Beacon UDID and my phone should launch my app based on that. And what libraries (I use ruby, but could do PHP, Python, anything on the Mac side) that would allow me to do that on both ends?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 832

Answers (1)

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64916

Yes, this is possible to do, but there are some challenges:

  1. OSX Yosemite cannot transmit as a beacon, at least not with its built-in bluetooth interface. At a minimum you need to add an external bluetooth dongle. You could then use an off the shelf-program like MacBeacon to transmit.

  2. While there are beacon detection tools for both iOS (CoreLocation, which is built-in) and Android (Android Beacon Library, which is an open source add-on), both require a custom App to be installed on the phone to detect beacons.

  3. You would need to make a custom app as described in (2) that would launch yet another app depending on the beacon identifier detected. This would require Objective C skills for iOS and Java skills for Android.

Upvotes: 1

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