I agree with Khurram. Customers do not care what the framework vendors use.
And I found many complains about Estimote beacons dead here, even mine is dead. If I try to find solution or good answers here community, I can not find. Most of answers are done by private mails directly. Why do not explain the problem and solution right here for others ? And I can not get good programming examples of measuring battery level for example, you provides just method guides, not actual code examples. It makes really difficult for developers to adapt your devices for applications. Estimote Inc needs to think seriously for answering customer complains.
Hi Choi,
We're really sorry for your bad experience. Please elaborate on your problem and we'll do our best to be of help.
Regards.
Khurram, Choi,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
We take our customers satisfaction very seriously.
Let me reply below and explain the issues you both mentioned.
As for the bug with iOS 7.1.1 all beacon providers using iOS Bluetooth Stack along with CoreLocation experience the issue. Thanks to CoreLocation the proximity is reported and stability of the signal improved. Without it, monitoring in the background would not be possible.
What we've observed is that the bug occurs quite randomly, so not every customer will experience it.
Apple is currently working to fix this issue.
Read more on beekn.net: http://beekn.net/2014/05/beacon-bug-apple-loses-ibeacon-ranging-drives-developers-mad/.
In terms of dead beacons, we wrote a blog post explaining the whole issue and it's available here:
http://blog.estimote.com/post/83618039493/how-to-extend-estimote-beacon-battery-life.
As we want to investigate each such case individually, we ask you to write directly to us.
With a quick chat we can discuss all the factors that could have affected the battery like settings, external factors, usage. Each case is different and there are quite a few possible scenarios, we believe a personal discussion with one of our Community Managers will help solve your problem most effectively.
Considering battery measurements;
At the moment extremely accurate battery readings are difficult to achieve. Our high fidelity beacon firmware fluctuates battery use to save on power consumption. In doing this battery readings can be incorrect. We are working to solve the issue at the moment and will have an update soon.
You've mentioned that it's difficult to adapt our beacons for applications. Could you please elaborate on this? Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to write apps for our beacons and we would really like to hear your feedback.
Hi Ola,
Does that mean that if we just use CoreBluetooth API (sufficient for our use case for now) and avoid CoreLocation, we will be fine. If that's the case, we can avoid using the Estimote SDK and directly use the CoreBluetooth API to detect beacons. Let me know what you think?
Gimbal beacons work perfectly fine as I wrote above. Looks like they don't use CoreLocation
Hi Khurram,
Estimote SDK supports finding beacons via CoreBluetooth. It is better to use our SDK as it can decode from Bluetooth advertising packet more data like major, minor values.
In ESTBeaconManager there is method startEstimoteBeaconsDiscoveryForRegion that uses CoreBluetooth for discovery.
Please note that different delegate methods will be invoked in ESTBeaconManagerDelegate: - (void)beaconManager:(ESTBeaconManager *)manager didDiscoverBeacons:(NSArray *)beacons inRegion:(ESTBeaconRegion *)region;
Please also note:
not all properties will be available in ESTBeacon class when using CoreBluetooth.
Do refer to our SDK documentation: http://estimote.com/api/index.html
Hi Ola,
Now that iOS7.1.2 is out, has anyone tested this bug with it? The release notes state that Apple has fixed some iBeacon bugs, this might be one of them.
This issue is unchanged in iOS 7.1.2. The iPhone 5S still fails for startAdvertising after the first call. The first call succeeds, and then any subsequent call will send one advertisement only and then die. Works on other devices and can be easily replicated with Apple's sample app.
Hi there,
We haven't encountered it in iOS 7.1.2 yet. Will, are you unable to detect the beacons with 7.1.2?
Cheers.
I'm pretty sure there are 2 or 3 issues discussed in this thread. The one from the original poster as well as my posts and some others is very simple. The iPhone 5S is broken. It cannot advertise as a beacon. The first call succeeds. Subsequent calls fail. Done. That's it. Still broken in 7.1.2. Huge bug. Trivial to reproduce.
Other posts are referencing unrelated things. I have never seen a problem detecting the Estimotes personally.
Hi there,
Got it! Sorry, thought you were referring to a different issue, affecting detecting the beacons through Core Location.
Cheers.
Has anyone tried detecting the beacons with a first gen iPad mini?
Haven't had a chance to look at it properly (as my beacons only came yesterday) but using the demo app my Android phone works faultlessly while the iPad fails completely to detect anything.
iOS is on version 7.1.2. The set device as beacon feature does work though.
Perry, haven't heard about such issues before.
Would be great if you could investigate it further.
Best,