I am making a react native app which monitors in background and killed state and ranges for beacons in foreground. I need to monitor more than 20 unique UUID region, to distinguish. Is there a way to monitor for beacons keeping uuid as null so it detects every beacon and then range to find uuid and send to server?
No, you must specify at least the UUID when defining a beacon region to monitor and there is a limit of 20 regions.
If you know approximately which geographic region contains which beacons that you are interested in then you could combine location services with beacon monitoring; changing the set of beacon regions based on the current geographic location.
Related
I want to build that gets notified (even when in the background) when it gets in range of any iBeacon with a given UUID.
I know I could monitor an individual region for each of my beacons, but if I understand correctly, on iOS, I am limited to 20 monitored regions.
So the other alternative is to monitor a region based solely on its UUID, but then when do I get enter/exit notifications for that region? Whenever I get in range or out of range of any beacon with the same UUID, or only when I get in range of the first one and out of range of the last one?
If you monitor based on a wildcard region that includes only a ProximityUUID (leaving major and minor nil) then :
You will only get one didEnter callback the first time the first beacon is detected. If a second, third, or additional beacon is detected matching this wildcard region, then you did not get any monitoring callbacks.
You won't get any further callbacks until all beacons matching the wildcard region disappear (this takes at least 30 seconds in the foreground, longer in the background.) At that time, you'll get a call to didExit. After receiving a didExit, you will again be eligible for the callback in (1) above.
If you want more granular callbacks about individual beacons there are a few choices:
Use additional region definitions (up to the 20 allowed) and monitor them all.
Dynamically change the regions you are monitoring when you get a didEnter. This might work if you have a limited number of beacons (e.g. less than 20) matching a particular wildcard region. You could then activate monitoring for each of these sub-regions.
Use ranging APIs. These give you callbacks once per second with a list of all matching beacons seen that match a region. The trick is that this is generally limited to 10 seconds after region transition in the background. But it is possible to extend it to 180 seconds on request, or indefinitely if you declare your app to be a background location app in Info.plist. (If you go this route, there are a few tricks to get this working properly.)
I was trying to understand the difference between Beacon Ranging and BLE Scanning. From what I understand, beacon ranging uses BLE scanning to find the beacons. On top of that it calculates proximity of beacons using the signal strength(which I do not need). I just need to detect the beacons(similar to beacon monitoring). I am not using beacon monitoring because of the Always permission requirement in IOS. I know that beacon monitoring is highly optimised as compared to ranging, but I wanted to know how ranging compares to BLE scanning.
Can i use BLEModule.scanForDevices(UUID) in place of CLLocationManager.startRangingBeacons(region) to detect beacons? If yes, can I get callbacks in similar fashion when beacon is detected?
Are there any downsides of doing this in terms of battery performance or detection time, etc.?
Note that I am willing to make do without proximity information(distance from beacon).
Also, a related question:
Can beacon monitoring be used in foreground with WhenInUse permission in iOS?(I found mixed views on this in my initial investigation)
You cannot use Core Bluetooth scanning to detect an iBeacon. You must use Core Location and monitor a CLBeaconRegion to discover iBeacons.
Having discovered a beacon you do not need to range it.
As stated in Apple's documentation
Important
Apps must have always authorization to use region monitoring, and they must be configured with the Location updates background mode to be launched.
Even if you only want beacon notification when your app is in the foreground you must request always permission.
I am trying to build a test app that would detect a given set of iBeacon deployed in a few physical locations. The detection should be done in the background, and make a call to a server following a certain logic.
Apple's rule of thumb is using the same UUID for all of my physical locations:
The UUID is shared by all locations.
This allows an iOS device to use a single identifier to recognize any of the stores with a single region.
Each specific store, San Francisco, Paris, and London, is then assigned a unique major value, allowing a device to identify which specific store
it is in.
I found the call for setting a region with a given UUID, but did not find what object is returned when the UUID is detected, and what fields are returned.
Where does the app get the major/minor value when iOS detects a beacon with a given UUID?
When using monitoring APIs, you only get a CLBeaconRegion object in the enter/exit callback from CoreLocation. A beacon region defined by this class typically doesn't represent individual beacons, but a range of beacons based on wildcard identifiers.
Because of this, if you use wildcards in your region definition (as is typical) you actually can't see which specific beacon triggered a region entry. To solve this problem, you must combine both monitoring and ranging APIs at the same time. If you monitor and range simultaneously, CoreLocation will give you a callback in the didRangeBeacons beacons: [CLBeacon] inRegion region: CLBeaconRegion method with an array of all the CLBeacon objects it saw.
Because the callback with the array of beacons arrives once per second, however, you will need to add custom logic to do something only once when beacon first appears, if necessary.
Since you want background detection, it is important that you do both ranging and monitoring simultaneously. Even if you don't put anything in your monitoring callback because of the lack of specific beacon information, you need to do monitoring just to get your app woken up in the background on a new beacon detection. Then, you will get ranging callbacks for approximately 10 seconds before your app is suspended again.
From what I have understood, minor and major ids in beacons are used for segmentation (for instance, major for physical stores and minor for different locations within a given store).
Then, as a beacon does not deliver rich payload, I guess those ids will be exploited to deserve the adequate information to the user - and probably through webservices.
Finally, UUID are said to be for the whole fleet. From what I understand, an app (e.g for retail store) is likely to register for only one or a few UUID (generally one, more for complex architectures or overload of services).
At the application level, you can (1) range for beacons when the app is foreground (with catching capabilities for minor/major ids), and (2) detect region exit/entry (monitoringForRegion:) while in background + deliver UILocalNotification to wake up the app (going back to (1)).
Now lets deal with the end user. I think we can assume that the average one will not go through a whole retail store with the app in foreground in his hand, and is more likely to have it running in background.
Consequently, case (2) will be the most common one.
But as all emitters will share the same UUID and as the geolocation manager running in background is monitoring for region linked to UUID, didEnter and didExit regions delegate methods risk no to be triggered intelligently depending on the range/configuration of emitters. Finally, not all the indoor location-based advertising you wanted to broadcast to your customers will be received and catched.
In fact, I fear that only the one when the customer will arrive at the store location will be systematically suggested (in a background mode context).
Am I missing something?
You are mostly right. The one thing you are missing is that you can monitor on 20 different regions simultaneously, and these regions can optionally include the major and/or the minor. So you could trigger many times in a (big) store by intelligently designing your iBeacon identifiers and region monitors.
Two caveats: in-region monitoring callbacks fire when the beacon first comes into range (about 50m). They are also not simultaneous. They can take up to 15 min on an iPhone 4S with the app in the background, although it is faster on an iPhone 5.
To phrase what David said a little differently:
You can define a beacon region using a UUID, a UUID and a major value, or a UUID + a major and a minor value.
If you define a region using just the UUID, any beacon with that UUID will trigger a didEnterRegion message, and the OS will treat all beacons with that UUID as part of the same region.
However, if you create a region with UUID+Major, or UUID+Major+Minor, only beacons matching those values will trigger a region notification. You can have 2 beacons with the same UUID and major value right next to each other and different minor values. If you've registered 2 different regions with specific UUID+Major+Minor value, you'll get independent enter/exit/ranging messages about each region. A third beacon with the same UUID and major value but a different minor value will not trigger enter/exit notifications.
This question is about when the Application is in background
I got a Application which works with 2 iBeacons (same UUID, same Major, different minor ).
The first iBeacon (minor 1) is for example for the Door. When the App is in the Background i get a Notification that i enter the region. This works fine. And now, for example, i walk in the Store and at some Point is the second iBeacon (minor 2).
If i'm in the immediate Zone of the second iBeacon, the Application should fire a notification. ("Hey you're at the cashpoint").
But i read that's not possible when the Applikation is in the Background. It only works when i hit the shoulder button or home button.
http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2013/11/13/ibeacon-monitoring-in-the-background-and-foreground.html
So the Question: Can anybody give me a hint how to implement this use case.
Several things:
When you create a beacon region, you can either match on just the UUID, the UUID and major value, or the UUID, major AND minor value.
If you specify just the UUID, your beacon enter/exit notices will not include major/minor value information.
Likewise, if you create a region with a UUID and major but not minor value, your beacon enter/exit messages will include the UUID of the beacon and the major, but not the minor, value.
The simplest thing to do is to create a separate region for reach unique beacon you're tracking. Then you'll get separate enter/exit notices for each beacon.
If you want multiple beacons to be part of the same region, but report different major or major/minor values, you have to turn on beacon ranging and wait for a ranging call. In the ranging call you'll get an array of beacon objects (not beacon region objects, CLBeacon objects) for all beacons that match the current region. The beacon objects will include the actual UUID, major, and minor for that beacon.
If you are in the background and have both beacon monitoring and ranging turned on, you'll get an didEnterRegion message (or maybe a changed state message) followed by several seconds of ranging information, and then your app will go back to sleep.
When your app is in the background, your only real option is to display a local notification and hope the user wakes your app again. If the user swipes that notice, the system prompts the user for unlock credentials if needed, and then takes the user back to your app.