Hello,
Is it possible to fetch monitoring information of a beacon without having an app installed or only having the estimote app?
Our plan is to build a web application in JavaScript using the Cordova Bridge, in which the phones connected to certain beacons are displayed. So no interaction on the phones except giving the information to the cloud, that they are in the proximity of certain beacons.
We do not want to use an additional app(maybe beside the estimote-app) and simply integrating the code into an existing web application. Is that even possible? Or should we create a “dummy-app” which only serves as a beacon finder?
Thank you in advance for your help.
There’s a draft of an API for web browsers that would allow web sites to scan for beacons:
https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/scanning.html
… but sadly, that’s all it is for now—just a draft. It says last update was on 19 April 2019, so it looks like there’s some progress/somebody still working on it, but it’s gonna take time till this is finalized and starts being actually implemented in web browsers.
So for now, detecting beacons still requires a dedicated mobile app. It could be a “dummy app”, as you called it, that’s simply detecting beacons and forwarding these detections to your API, so that your web-app/web-site can make use of that data.
For Cordova, the best beacon plugin I know is https://github.com/petermetz/cordova-plugin-ibeacon, which uses the iBeacon protocol. Note that Estimote Beacons no longer ship with iBeacon enabled by default, so you’ll need to reconfigure your beacons to work with this plugin.
1 Like
Hello Piotr,
thank you for the quick reply. I guess I will try out the “dummy-app” approach then.
With reconfigure, do you mean switching iBeacon on in the “Configuration”-menu? And is there a different way to write it for a web-application/website then Cordova, or do you think that would be the best way?
Thank you again!
With reconfigure, do you mean switching iBeacon on in the “Configuration”-menu?
Exactly. If you’re gonna use iBeacon, you can also disable Estimote Monitoring to prolong the battery life. And maybe Estimote Telemetry if you’re not gonna use that too.
And is there a different way to write it for a web-application/website then Cordova, or do you think that would be the best way?
Generally speaking, we recommend to use our own Proximity SDK and the Estimote Monitoring technology, over iBeacon. There’s a short comparison on our dev portal: What is iBeacon? - Estimote Developer
But if you want our Proximity SDK inside Cordova, there are no ready-made plugins for that as far as I’m aware, so you’d need to build one yourself, and that means more time to invest, and also some knowledge of native development comes in handy. The iBeacon plugin on the other hand is ready-to-go. (But if you run into any troubles, Estimote won’t be able to help, because that plugin uses Apple’s APIs on iOS, and Android Beacon Library on Android, and we don’t have control over these.)
We do have a Proximity SDK plugin for React Native, if RN is something you’d want to consider: GitHub - Estimote/react-native-proximity: React Native wrapper for Estimote Proximity SDK