Challenges and Tips While Dealing With iBeacon Development

These days it’s easy to locate a nearest food or a mall, but when it comes to locating/navigating inside mall or place where GPS does not work, what would you do then?

This is where iBeacon comes handy to navigate places in situation like these.

iBeacon was developed by Apple and was introduced in 2013 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Here are some of the features which iBeacon offers:

• iBeacon uses battery efficient proximity sensing. It ensures that it consumes less battery while turning on bluetooth.
• Since it uses proximity sensing technology, it is accurate indoors which is immune to issues relating to building penetration.
• The iBeacon track users when they come into the range of an iBeacon so they do not track users everywhere they go hence their privacy is preserved.
• It is affordable as even an iPad or any other device compatible with it can be configured and the technology is accessible.

However, developing iBeacon app is not that easy as it seems like and the developers encounter unexpected challenges.

Here are the following challenges which developers encounter while developing iBeacon app:

Frequency Issues

As all Beacons do not have the same frequency and do not transmit similar signals of same power, It presents a challenge before the developers to make the beacon transmit messages to the users when they step in the proximity, even if the signals are weak. The Beacon signal is affected by various factors such as weather conditions, device power and temperature. Which means users are getting delayed notifications due to low frequency levels.

The signal frequency can be solved by designing the app to make the choices depending of information received.

Tracking during Triangulation

This issue arises when three beacons are close to each other and the user comes in the vicinity of them. Therefore, it becomes difficult for the app to find in which range the user is in and hence the messages will be sent accordingly.

The best way to prevent this issue is to use a combination of Wi-Fi triangulation and bluetooth signals to accurately pinpoint a person’s location.

Navigating In the App Store

This is the final stage where navigating in the app store is a challenge. This is what you can do:

• Explain in the description how the app works for both public and private in review notes.
• A short video could be uploaded explaining the functions of the app.
• Lastly, put a disclaimer for battery use in your description.

Wrap up

For developers, building a specific iBeacon app is quite unique and different from developing other apps. To overcome these challenges we can use pre-built tools as well as client library extensions which will link iBeacons to their real world location, users to beacon and users to users. Using beacons requires you to manage permissions and user expectations, coding well against unpredictable hardware collections, and provide a means to link a beacon identifier with a useful element in the application.

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director