I think I have posted this somewhere already, but I’ll post it here as well (: My personal thinking on iBeacon & Eddystone:
When it comes to Eddystone vs iBeacon, at this moment, I’d personally still lean towards iBeacon. Its has great built-in support in iOS, and as of now, there’s no advantage to using Eddystone on Android over iBeacon—all the beacon libraries I know use the exact same Android BLE API to detect both, so the experience should be identical. There are some rumors about Google adding native Eddystone support to their Play Services, which might make Eddystone a better choice on Android then. But then of course, on iOS it’s gonna be exactly opposite: since iBeacon is built into the iOS, it’s gonna be better than Eddystone. (Where by “better” I usually mean: more responsive and/or energy efficient.)
But then there’s also Eddystone-URL and native support for it in Chrome on iOS and Android, and rumors about upcoming beacon integration in Google Maps / Google Now—probably gonna be Eddystone-exclusive, since iBeacon license technically prohibits it from being used on non-iOS systems, and I can’t imagine Google wanting to fight that.
But then (
), as you noticed yourself, there’s so many more libraries/tools for iBeacon at the moment, and they are more stable, feature-complete, etc.
All in all—it’s a tough choice you need to make, after weighing in all the pros and cons
At Estimote, we try to make it a little bit easier: our brand-new Location Beacons can broadcast both iBeacon and Eddystone at the same time, so if you wanted to, you could use iBeacon on iOS and Eddystone on Android and for compatibility with Google apps.
As for your other points:
- yeah, “Eddystone can also use the iBeacon frame” is a weird statement, no idea what the author has actually meant
- range doesn’t really depend on the packet type; think: how loud you can scream doesn’t depend on the language you scream in (:
- the beacon’s battery life doesn’t really depend on the packet type; iBeacon and Eddystone frames or so comparable in size that any difference should be negligible
- but keep in mind that it might make a different on the smartphone’s battery life, per what I pasted above & how iOS optimizes for iBeacon