Is there any practical way to get the UUID + Major + Minor ID of one or more Estimote Stickers around?
Is using the SDK the only possible way to discover stickers in general (without seeing the UUID, Major, Minor identifiers being exposed at any time)?
Knowing that, would be helpful. Until now it was possible to create an app that works across different iBeacon types (even vendors) using the standard iOS CoreLocation functions for beacon monitoring and ranging. I wonder if this is still an option with the stickers.
We designed stickers around our own protocol, which allowed us to do a lot of cool stuff that wouldn't be possible with iBeacon: access to lots of data without needing to connect to a sticker (accelerometer readings, temperature, battery level etc.), adaptive advertising interval to make sure stickers are super-responsive while also conserving the energy usage, distance estimation algorithm that works better with various iOS devices etc. Naturally, we were fully aware that this means losing compatibility with iBeacon and Core Location, so we carefully weighed the pros and cons, but in the end decided that the former rather outweigh the latter and went with the custom protocol.
Bottom line: stickers bring a lot of goodies with their new advertising protocol, but at this time are not iBeacon compatible and we don't support Core Location based discovery for stickers.
What do you think about this decision? I encourage you play around with stickers and the Estimote SDK, see what's possible thanks to the stickers protocol, and share your opinion—I'd love to hear it! Feel free to post on our Community forums or ping me directly: piotr (at) estimote.com
Hi Piotr. Thanks for the quick response and clarification. I appreciate it. I totally understand the path you are going with this and I definitely see a lot of value in the new custom sticker payload. Great work with that.
That being said working with hardware that is compliant to a standard (in this case iBeacon) did help me make the decision for supporting it in our apps. Supporting only the Stickers is a tough decision at this point, as the market is even more limited than the already tiny one for iBeacons/Tags in general. However don't get me wrong. I am still interested even with that limitation, just because the stickers are such a great format. Going back and forth with this at the moment.
Originally I did assume that the Stickers actually were "real compliant" iBeacons. So that was a misconception on my end.
Side notes: I am tinkering with the SDK and I do like it, especially the new trigger rules are very helpful to shorten development time. Also I appreciate the effort with the new example projects, and as a bonus the Swift versions for each. Thumbs up. Keep on the great work.