iOS NearBy devices - ios

Question

Hi I am creating two apps where each app needs to know the location of the other app. I am using corelocation for that. However I am not sure whats the best/efficient way of getting the nearby devices. I can create a database with co-ordinates using parsi api. However I think that would be a lot of work to calculate the shortest distance every few minutes. Any ideas? I have a map for each app and i want to display the shortest distance between the two users on the map.I am using google maps api for ios

Answer 1

The API to calculate distance is pretty lightweight. Internally you use the Haversine formula to calculate distance including the curvature of the Earth. From the iOS perspective though you simply do this:
CLLocation* previousPoint = [self.allLocations objectAtIndex:i-1];
CLLocation* currentPoint = [self.allLocations objectAtIndex:i];
CLLocationDistance distanceFromPrevPoint = [previousPoint distanceFromLocation:currentPoint];
You can easily iterate over the other devices in the zone. If you want to reduce the number of calculations, you could only calculate distances to devices in the same base latitude longitude (ignore minutes and seconds).

Answer 2

Since you're using Parse, you should be able to do a PFQuery for all place objects within a given range. See the documentation here: https://www.parse.com/docs/ios_guide#geo/iOS (Geo Queries)

Answer 3

If they're close enough (~30 meters) you can use iBeacons.
What would work the best depends on your particular app's needs.
Edit: Since you said your distance is too far, iBeacons won't work.
The brute-force way to do this is to run through all connected devices and calculate the (Pythagorean) distance to each one, and select the ones that are within your distance threshold. That's very time-consuming however.
Instead you might want to have each device report some sort of region code for each location (State? County? Zip code?) as the location changes. You'd use geocoding to generate the region information. You could have the reporting devices do the geocoding themselves, so they are only responsible for updating location information for a single device and you don't bog down doing geocoding. You'd report lat/long and region information to the server as it changes, with a "choke" to only report changes on significant changes, or once per minute, whichever is LESS frequent. (I remember reading in the docs that you are only supposed to submit a small number of geocoding calls or you get locked out and/or your app gets rejected.)
You'd collect the data in a central server.
Then you could start by requesting other users that match your current region (and possibly nearby regions) and then do distance calculations only on that small subset of your data that matches the region code.