Android Question Beacons year 2022

[udg]

Hi all,
for my next project I'd like to play with BLE/BLE2 beacons. I've read a few threads available on our forum, but I feel it's time to update all the info and on-the-field experience gathered through the yeras.
So, please, contribute with your successful (and failing) stories about products, OS versions, limitations,...

Reading past threads, it seems that the Eddystone way is "safer" then the iBeacon one since for the latter to be used with iOS devices you should know beforehand the UDID of the beacons you will use in your project. Does it still apply?
Another point could be: can we deploy an app that costantly searches for beacons (while draining some battery) even while in background? I hope in an OS generated event when a beacon/ble device is found (but startforeground+partiallock in Android could be ok too as long as there's an iOS counterpart).

Anyway, let's start with the basics: pros and cons.

Thank you all

 

[Erel]

The relevant thread about iBeacons and B4i is this one: https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/ibeacons.79257/#content
You can pass any UDID you like to SearchForBeacon.
There is also a post about background tracking in that thread.
You will not be able to track other types of beacons in iOS without the app running in the foreground.

On Android you can have a foreground service with a partial lock. It will not work reliably on all devices.

 

[udg]

Thank you, @Erel.
So nothing changed in the last few years. What could have resulted in a great help for any kind of "ubiquitos" technology and related services is still suffering the initial limitations, imho. Anyway, let me summarize the state of the art:

Apple's iBeacons
Discoverable by Android devices with no limitations
Discoverable by iOS devices only when UDID of each beacon is known beforehand. Working with a list of hundreds of beacons means costantly looping on all of their UDIDs in order to detect whether at leat one of them is near the user device
Both Android and iOS could scan beacons while in background, although non necessarily in a reliable and dependable manner.

Google's Eddystone beacons
Discoverable by Android devices with no limitations
Discoverable by iOS devices only when app is in foreground mode
Both Android and iOS could scan beacons while in background, although non necessarily in a reliable and dependable manner.

Based on the above, Eddystone beacons sounds a betetr choice.

ps: on a totally different subject I sent you a private mail; I guess this time it went to the spam folder. No problem, just to make you aware of it.