CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiosibeacongeofencingclcircleregion
Jake
Jake

Reputation: 379

Geofencing, iBeacons, and sending notifications when people walk into a restaurant

I'm trying to send a notification through my iOS and Android apps when a user walks through the front door of a restaurant. I've tried Geofencing, but the minimum radius isn't small enough and people will get notifications from multiple restaurants in the area. I know iBeacons exist. Are they my only option? (I know Foursquare sends these kinds of notifications, but I don't think they use iBeacons.)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 576

Answers (2)

arc4randall
arc4randall

Reputation: 3293

You would need a beacon inside the restaurant already, otherwise geofencing is going to be your only option. You could combine geofencing with a gps call and see if the gps call is within a lat long you have deemed to be inside that establishment, and then repeat this gps call every few minutes while you are inside the geofence until it matches a coordinate inside the place.

The disadvantage to this approach is that the battery drain will be higher than using ibeacons, which operate using BLE (bluetooth low energy)

Upvotes: 1

davidgyoung
davidgyoung

Reputation: 64961

Beacons are much more accurate than Geofences, but they still have a range of about 40 meters. In a dense urban area, beacons might still trigger notifications from multiple adjacent restaurants at the same time. You might also trigger the notification as the user walks by on the sidewalk. There are ways you can lesson the likelihood of this by placing beacons inside the restaurant so the signal is very weak outside. But you cannot eliminate it.

The Foursquare does use beacons. I know this because the Android version of their started being bundled with the Android Beacon Library about two years ago, and I'm the lead developer on that open source project. That said, I suspect they use a combination of geofences and beacons, only using beacons for cases where customers actually have them installed.

Geofence-based notifications are especially problematic on iOS because geofences often fall back to location from cell towers to save battery when no location apps are in the foreground. Cell tower locations are only accurate within a kilometer or two, and will trip a geofence of the outer range of the location uncertainty overlaps with the geofence. This can trigger a restaurant welcome notification from over a mile away.

One way to improve bad Geofence-based notifications like this is to use the following technique on iOS:

  1. Request an extra 180 seconds of background running time when the geofence is tripped.
  2. Request location updates with GPS, and monitor these updates for 180 seconds in the background.
  3. Using the location update data, if you find that the accuracy of the fix is high enough and the distance from the restaurant is small enough, then trigger the notification. Until and unless this happens, don't trigger it at all.

Upvotes: 2

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