It’s kind of a legacy thing. In the past, we used to identify beacons in Estimote Cloud via their MAC addresses. In next-gen beacons w/ firmware 4.x, we switched to custom device identifiers instead. So throughout most of our stack, we actually use the MAC/identifier interchangeably now.
For beacons w/ firmware < 4, MAC is the identifier, and identifier is the MAC.
For beacons w/ firmware > 4, the 16-byte device ID is the identifier, and we don’t store MAC addresses in Cloud anymore. But for legacy reasons where we used to treat the MAC as identifier, and to keep partial backward compatibility with old APIs, we do return that 16-byte device ID as the MAC.
I hope it makes at least some sense 