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Google Eddystone challenges Apple’s iBeacon

Last week Google announced the general availability of its Eddystone platform for beacons. Eddystone is open source and multi-platform. Google has made sure Eddystone will support Android, iOS and another other platform with support for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) thus giving it a wider range of devices which will access its services and data.

Eddystone includes a new open Bluetooth low energy (BLE) format and two new APIs; Google Nearby API and Google Proximity Beacon API. The Google Nearby API for Android and iOS makes it possible for applications to communicate with nearby BLE devices and beacons using BLE. The Google Proximity Beacon API is used to associate a beacon with a place or location associated with a lat/long. The Eddystone APIs allow developers to associate a beacon with a physical location (the Proximity Beacon API) and extract data from nearby beacons, (the Nearby API).

An interesting feature of Eddystone is that Google has removed the necessity for users to have an application installed to receive proximity based notifications. Eddystone will use both URLs that can open in any browser and UUIDs, similar to Apple’s iBeacon.

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