Unleash the true power of mobile with eddystone

Few years back, Google announced the open-source cross-platform of Bluetooth based beacon technology called ‘Eddystone’ which lets apps and web-services to pinpoint your exact location. This technology is flexible, robust and cross-platform and helps to communicate with the eddystone android and eddystone iOS device to collects data for your app

This technology was named after a historically famous lighthouse in English coast in the century of Comwall. Just like lighthouse has helped sailors to navigate the world for many years; in the same way, electronic beacon can be used to provide precise location and contextual cues within the apps to help you to navigate the real word. For instance: Eddystone can provide you real-time alerts or delays by tracking the bus at bus-stop.

Eddystone based beacon app notifies the customer whenever there is something important to inform. You get much more accuracy than Wi-Fi and GPS; locating the devices that are as close as few centimeters away. The open nature of Eddystone makes its mobile-app the ultimate game—changer.

Some features of Eddystone to look for: –

Cross-Platform Support and Real-world usability: Eddystone is designed with the motive to communicate with different nearby devices and helps the users with location-based information directly on their smart-phones or tablets. Being cross-compatible it works across android, iOS and many other platforms that are supporting beacons; this significantly increases your mobile app reach and ultimately your business. And it is available on GitHub under the open-source Apache v2.0 license, so that manufacturers and developers can access, comment and contribute to it.

Robust and Extensible: It supports multiple types of frames for different functionalities and purpose. Frames are:

  • Universally unique identifier (Eddystone UID): This frame has unique id and supports 16 byte number which instantly identifies specific beacons in the group; app listen to this and perform the action accordingly. For instance, if you are in retail-store and if that retail store has deployed beacon; the app could be programmed to listen for specific beacon and then send special coupons or information.
  • Universal Resource Locator (Eddystone URL): This frame is the simplest one to use; all you need is beacon & particular URL and you are all good to go. The store can send URL to the user’s phone and the customer can look up the coupon and relevant information on a web browser. This refrains the store-owner and customer to develop and download respectively the specific mobile app.
  • Telemetry (Eddystone TLM): With this frame, beacon can transmit data to their own organization. The data is called telemetry and is useful to monitor the operation of vast fleets of beacons, battery health and much more. Since TLM frame does not contain beacon ID, it must be paired up UID or URL to transmit information.
  • Ephermal Identifires (EHS): This frame provides privacy and security and enables only authorized client to decode them. Here, ID constantly changes when broadcasted from beacon and can be read precisely by trusted device. For the security purpose, it is not recommended to pair EID with other signals.

Changes common user-experience: Using beacons, eddystone can enhance your interaction with the globe by predicting location. Eddystone was launched to help the developers to build more contextual apps. For example: – estimote beacon deployed on railway-station can trigger the notification to the people about the train time directly on their phones. The technology is invisible and can create wonders without having your mobile customers to do anything. The users just have to download the app or agree in advance to receive messages as and when they enter any specific venue.

Hardware Scenario: As seen above, Eddystone has extensible frame format; the hardware used for eddystone can support multiple mobile platforms and applications with single hardware. BLE beacon can be converted into Eddystone compliant beacon app with just simple hardware update.

Eddystone for developers: Google beacon platform is integrated with two APIs

  • Nearby API: It makes easier for the eddystone android and eddystone iOS app to search and make communication easier with nearby device.
  • Proximity beacon API: This is the cloud API that enables the developers to connect with the semantic location such as lat/long i.e. stored in cloud

We can be your partner – Let’s build together Eddystone compliant beacon based app

Eddystone is the perfectly the best step from Google to grow your business. As the market is growing high, this is the best time to update your mobile app to Eddystone or if you are planning to develop from scratch; think ‘Eddystone’ when you think of ‘Location’. BLE Mobile Apps can help you to build mobile app with beacon support. Let’s discuss on how we can make it smart.