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.
Related
I'm building an iOS App, in which I would wish to handle more than 20 iBeacons. Basically all beacons added to the web portal have to be handled by the App. Since there is an iOS restriction to number of region to be monitored as 20, I'm unable to give different local notifications for beacons in same region (having same UUID).
Is there any way to handle this?
A few points:
The 20 region limit applies to the number of CLRegion objects that can be registered by a single app. It does not mean you can only detect 20 beacons. Since each CLRegion object can leave the major and/or minor nil (making the fields a wildcard), each one can match billions of beacons.
Beacon apps typically use local notifications, not push notifications.
The way you set up many different notifications to come from many different beacons is like this:
Define a single wildcard region that matches all of your beacons. (Or a few regions if needed for background triggering).
Start monitoring and ranging for each of these regions.
In the didRangeBeacond:inRegion callback keep a flag for each individual beacon to see if you have sent a notification for it before. If not, set the flag to true and trigger a local notification specific to that beacon's identifiers.
I am developing an iOS 8 app with multiple Estimote iBeacons. According to (https://community.estimote.com/hc/communities/public/questions/200966066-How-detect-multiple-beacons-iOS?locale=en-us), I implemented one BeaconManager, and registered it with two BeaconRegions. However, only the second beacon region works.
Instead, I used two BeaconManagers and register one BeaconRegion for each of them. Now it works. However, a new problem occurs: in some cases when I enter or exit the region, I receive multiple notifications for one beacon, instead of only one. This link (http://beekn.net/2013/11/ibeacon-tutorial-dealing-with-errors/) says it's a bug from Apple, but I am not sure about the case.
Anyone can help?
Thanks,
Ryan
Beacon regions are shared system resources, which means that all the BeaconManagers and LocationManagers are notified about state changes of all the regions registered in the app.
Example: if you monitor beacon region A with manager A, and beacon region B with manager B, manager A will still get notifications about region B. Same for manager B and region A.
Because of that, it rarely makes sense to have more than one instance of a BeaconManager in your app.
Monitoring multiple regions should work just fine with a single BeaconManager, there must be something specific to your code that leads to one of the regions not working. If you could add a code snippet to your question, that'd probably help tracking the issue down.
As per my opinion, these should be only one beacon manager to manage all beacon.
And if you have beacon from same vendor (In your case it is Estimote iBeacons) then I don't think that you need to create more than one region here.
Because all beacons of same vendors have same proximity UUID. What is different is its Major value and Minor value.
So you can differentiate all beacons with its Major and Minor values also there is a ranging which can make a further granularity for seperation.
For a specific business case, I would like to trigger proximity-based notification (push or UILocalNotification) by leveraging the iBeacon technology.
This is aimed to work while the app is in background/lockscreen.
I have some specific constraints :
The product has to scale at a certain level so it's not possible to range 20 regions. We will range on one UUID only (maybe 2 or 3 if we develop new set of features, but we will not register a region per physical beacon)
We will use the major and minor to call webservices
Regarding this, I know I will have to use the following approach : first didEnterRegion: with no prior information on the major/minor/distance, and then didRangeBeacon: to perform more advanced actions.
I already use local storage mechanisms to timeout a beacon after he has been used considering the fast beaming rate of beacons.
* The major constraints : we have to region events regarding to the distance of the beacon (exemple, only trigger the notification if CLProximityImmediate)
Now I see a major limitation. As my app will only range in background for a few seconds after it entered in a region, if I had constraints based on the distance/proximity, it is very possible that the app will:
return to background state before the user get close enough from the physical beacon for the event to be triggered
never be triggered again because it has to enter the region to range again, which will probably not happen
Do you have any ideas / work around for such a case ?
You are absolutely correct on the limitations CoreLocation applies in this use case. If you set it up as you describe, the typical behavior will be that the app will detect the beacon in the background at an unknown distance (often the max range of around 50 meters), range in the background for about 5 secs, then the app will be suspended by iOS. That five seconds of ranging time will typically not be enough for the user to get near enough to the beacon to trigger your use case.
Unfortunately, there are no easy workarounds with standard beacons and CoreLocation. CLBeaconRegion objects do not have a distance field like CLCircularRegion does for geofences.
Two more extreme approaches you might try:
Turn off monitoring of your one region as soon as you detect the device is too far away, then re-enable it right as your app suspends itself in the applicationWillResignActive: callback. You might get a new entry event and more background ranging time.
Use nonstandard beacons that periodically stop their transmissions to trigger forced exit/entry events.
I have been working on a prototype iOS app utilizing iBeacons to provide location-relevant information to office employees depending on where in the office they are. The ideal use case is that whenever an employee enters or exits their office, a callback is fired which provides them some information in the form of a notification (it might make a server query to get information first, etc - that sort of thing). We also want to be able to do this when the app is backgrounded or terminated; fortunately, we already know that beacon region boundary crossings trigger the appropriate CoreLocation callbacks even if the app is backgrounded or suspended.
From looking around, I understand that broadly, I have two options for how to approach the beacon region monitoring:
Give each iBeacon its own CLBeaconRegion, and monitor for each of these regions independently.
Monitor for CLBeaconRegions that correspond to multiple iBeacons - for example, each iBeacon has the same UUID and only monitor for a CLBeaconRegion corresponding to that UUID - then try to determine which beacon triggered the boundary crossing using ranging.
Thus far, I had chosen option #1. The advantage of this approach is that I get didEnterRegion: and didExitRegion: calls for each individual beacon and immediately know which beacon I have entered/exited. Also, I only get one enter call and one exit call, which is exactly what I want. Unfortunately, I just realized that this approach also limits me to 20 beacons (since each beacon gets its own region).
I'm not as familiar with the exact implementation details of #2, so correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems that this approach has more drawbacks:
Apple discourages ranging when the app is in the background because the results may not be as accurate.
The ranging calls fire once every second, while I only want to have "enter/exit" callbacks.
If the beacons have region overlap, the ranging calls might continually flip which one is "closest", which would further complicate things.
Basically, I'm wondering if there is a way to utilize option #2, but still have the benefits of option #1 - a quick and easy way to immediately determine which beacon triggered the region change with only one enter or exit callback?
I hope this question is clear enough. It's not all entirely clear in my own head, especially how ranging works.
Option #2 is absolutely more complicated, but you must accept these complications in order to get around the 20 region monitoring limit.
A few points:
In the background, you only have around 5 seconds of ranging time, which does not give you as much time to average RSSI (signal strength) from each beacon to get a good distance estimate. So, yes, the estimates will be less accurate. If you understand this limitation and can live with it for your use case, there is nothing wrong with ranging in the background.
Yes, you will get multiple ranging calls per beacon after region entry, and you won't get any callbacks on region exit. You have to write extra code to take care of this. I have done this by maintaining a NSMutableArray of all the unique beacons (same uuid/major/minor) seen and update it in the ranging callback. You can then access this array in the region exit callback, so you know which beacons disappeared. Of course, it is possible that additional beacons were seen after the 5 seconds of background ranging time expires, but your app will never know about them. With this option, you must accept this limitation.
While it is true that errors on the distance estimate in ranging may incorrectly tell you which beacon is closest, you have an even worse problem when doing monitoring, because you don't get a distance estimate at all. If multiple beacons come into monitoring range around the same time, there is no guarantee that the first entered region callback you get will be for the closest beacon. So if your use case requires taking action based on the closest beacon, then you must do ranging (knowing that there may be error on the distance estimate.)
The drawback of the second approach is detecting the entry of a particular beacon will be purely based on ranging, that will not work if the application is killed. The reason is we will get didEnterRegion only once, because we are monitoring only one region with a particular UID. The next beacon with same UID will not be detected again if the application is terminated or if the background ranging stopped.
I recommend a combination of the mentioned approaches ,
Use same UID for all the beacons.
A beacon is uniquely identified using major/minor value that is collected when ranging.
As mentioned in apple doc, always keep number of monitoring regions below 20 by removing and adding beacons when the user moves from beacon to beacon (better to keep a beacon neighbour relationship graph in the server.)
Start ranging when entering the region ... and identify major/minor and calculate proximity.
Stop ranging when exiting the region.
Find the closest beacon from ranging method (need to skip unknown range beacons).
Monitor only the neighbours of the closest beacon in a given time.
When implementing both options, We should consider one fact, An iBeacon will be detected in 200feet distance. There may be multiple beacons in 200feet range.
If you use the same UUID for every beacon, you can just set the major/minor numbers to differentiate between the different beacons. This way, you are only monitoring for 1 beacon instead of > 20. Then just sort out which one is which from the other identifiers. This is how it works currently with Starbucks and other retailer apps. 1 beacon no matter where you are in the world, and different identifiers to sort things out on the back end.
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.