Google today announced a new beacon technology called Eddystone along with APIs that together it hopes will make it easier for Android and iOS-powered devices and beacons in close proximity to communicate with one another. Unlike iBeacon, Apple’s take on the Bluetooth-based protocol, Eddystone is open source and designed to be easily extendable, compatible with any device which supports the use of beacons. A new API announced alongside Eddystone, compatible with iOS and Android devices and available to Android developers today (iOS support forthcoming), uses inaudible sound emitted from device speakers and heard from other devices using their microphones to determine when other smartphones and tablets are nearby so data can be transmitted between them.
To learn more, read the full post over at 9to5Google.
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This was “unexpected”.
I like the strong privacy that they did!
(It’s an irony!)
“uses inaudible sound emitted from device speakers and heard from other devices using their microphones to determine when other smartphones and tablets are nearby so data can be transmitted between them”
That sounds like a really bad idea.
They sound like Dolphins. They communicate via Sonar! lol
How innovative of them. Might as well have called it “eyebeacon”
Just think, it will only be 6 months until the Android fanboys claim Apple copied the idea from Google.
So, they want 24/7 access to your microphone.. gee.. not gonna happen!
Eddystone has been a widely covered news piece, but there’s still quite a bit of confusion surrounding it. One of these is the confusion among businesses who have are currently deploying iBeacon and are not sure about how this announcement will impact their business. The true is, it doesn’t really change a lot. iBeacon (though unofficially) has been supported on Android since the very beginning. Thus, businesses looking to run beacon campaigns on Android devices needn’t necessarily use Eddystone. We have tried to answer some common questions like these in our Eddystone FAQ blog: http://blog.beaconstac.com/2015/08/eddystone-faqs-everything-you-need-to-know/