Meet Google’s “Eddystone”–a flexible, open source iBeacon fighter

jeremy · 07-14-2015, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Move over iBeacon—today Google is launching "Eddystone," an open source, cross-platform Bluetooth LE beacon format. Bluetooth beacons are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) trend. They're little transmitters (usually battery powered) that send out information about a specific point of interest, and that info is then passively picked up by a smartphone or tablet in range of the transmitter. A beacon-equipped bus stop could send out transit times, stores could send promotions to the customers currently in the store, or a museum could send people information about the exhibit they're standing in front of.

The name "Eddystone" might sound a little weird, but Google says it's named after the Eddystone Lighthouse in the UK. The motif is that beacons guide users and apps in the real world the same way lighthouses guide ship captains in the night. Being an open source project, they wouldn't want to name it "Google Beacon." It fits in well enough with the other non-obviously-branded open source Google projects like Android, Chromium, or Dart. This also isn't something they need to sell to the general public, just beacon OEMs and app developers.

We were able to talk with Eddystone's Product Manager, Matthew Kulick, and the Engineering Director, Chandu Thota, about the project. They described Eddystone as a "robust, extensible" beacon standard. "We have been working with many of the ecosystem partners to figure out the actual use cases, and we realized that existing solutions only partially address what is being asked for. We wanted to pull in businesses, developers, and the manufacturers and create an ecosystem that they can rally behind," Thota said. "There was a real desire from talking to them for a unified common ground that could be openly discussed, improved, and built on top of," Kulick told Ars.

Like iBeacon, but more open

At this point some of you are likely saying, "This already exists! It's called iBeacon!" Apple's two-year-old iBeacon standard has a number of problems though, the main one being that it's a proprietary standard that only works with iDevices. This mean it's cutting out half of the US smartphone market and 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market. When you're hoping to recruit companies to use this to advertise to their customers, immediately missing 50-80 percent of the possible customer base is a tough sell.

Eddystone is cross-platform—support is built into Google Play Services' Nearby API on Android, and it can be used via a library on iOS. Eddystone is also open source and is available on GitHub under the Apache v2.0 license (we'll update with links later once this all goes live).

The openness of Eddystone is the big differentiator. In contrast, Apple is so protective of iBeacon that when one company, Radius Networks, got iBeacon support up and running on Android, Apple contacted them and had the product shut down.

More at Ars...

--jeremy

andrish · 07-14-2015, 05:23 PM

Really nice extension of the underlying proximity technology. I wonder whether Apple will copy any of Google's new features. Anyway, grabbing myself an Eddystone dev kit and we'll see what I can make...