Google’s Eddystone – a flexible, open-source iBeacon alternative(arstechnica.com) |
Google’s Eddystone – a flexible, open-source iBeacon alternative(arstechnica.com) |
I really dislike the decision to make it part of the Play API (as opposed to standard Android), as it ends up not being really open after all.
I wish they would also document their packet format. At least they write that they support parallel operation as Eddystone + iBeacon [1], which means that they probably use the BLE "advertisement" frame for the iBeacon and the BLE "scan response" for the Eddystone data. With both frames limited to 29 bytes, there is not much space to toy around.
[0] http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2015/07/14/introducing-e...
[1] http://altbeacon.github.io/android-beacon-library/eddystone-...
> I really dislike the decision to make it part of the Play API (as opposed to standard Android), as it ends up not being really open after all.
doesn't really make sense. How do you open source storing data associated with a beacon in the cloud?
The beacon is dumb so it's the client program that associates the broadcast with some action. The only way to open source that is to document the format of the beacon broadcast and release tools to let anyone receive them and parse them, after which any action can be taken. Which is exactly what was open sourced.
The Play Services support seems to just be that you don't have to do it yourself if you don't want to on Android™ devices, because play services already has support. If they really want this to take off in iOS apps, though, the only real way they can help developers out is by releasing source directly, I believe (the git repo includes an example iOS app[1] but I haven't looked at it yet)
[1] https://github.com/google/eddystone/tree/master/tools/ios-ed...
https://github.com/google/eddystone/blob/master/protocol-spe...
I love this release Google needed to take a direction there are so many use cases for this sort of micro proximity I cannot wait to see what folks can do without freaking people out over privacy..
Damnit Google! Naming things after light-houses is our "thing"![1][2][3][4] :-)
All joking aside this sounds like a pretty cool project. And anything that helps keep as much IoT infrastructure open-source as possible, is a Good Thing in our book. I'm actually really hoping this catches on and displaces iBeacon as much as possible.
[1]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy/
[2]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/
In your 'travels', have you come across the need to integrate your services with the TechnologyOne line of products?
Information insight is a problem the company I work for struggles with immensely.
In particular most BLE implementations like CoreBluetooth and bluez have a lot of caching and assume that a device's broadcast & advertisement data rarely changes. This causes a ton of trouble when you put frequently changing data in broadcast packets since you can easily get stale or cached data instead of the most recent broadcast. I'd love to know if the Eddystone developers ran into similar issues with their telemetry packets and had any workarounds.
> Duplicate advertising reports are not required to be sent to the Host. A duplicate advertising report is an advertising report for the same device address while the Link Layer stays in the Scanning State. The advertising data may change; advertising data or scan response data is not considered significant when determining duplicate advertising reports.
Advertising really is designed to advertise the presence of a device. It isn't for putting data in - for that you should connect to the device.
If advertising isn't for putting data then arguably iBeacon, URI Beacon, Eddystone, etc. go against the spirit of the BLE spec.
In contrast, Apple's BLE implementation is robust and works well for since the iPhone 4S, and reliably on all the newer platforms
I'm currently working on my 3rd Android-BLE project and it's incredible how bad those APIs (and of course the vendor's implementations) are. An inconsistent pile of .. well, nothing nice. I don't get why they have no interest in fixing that..
Just like we don't trust Apple to build cloud services that don't suck, we don't trust Google to build a consistent hardware/OS experience across Android. This is stuff that is not sexy, but it has to be done, and it's exactly what you expect to be done by a company that doesn't have 30+ years in building their own hardware + OS.
This is a killer. This isn't really open source at all [0]. Google controls the eco-system, and has most of the other vendors at its mercy (like how they flip search algorithms, give Google products a prominent listing in the search page, blacklist developers/websites etc). More than Search, its the mobile OS and API monopoly that Google is trying to build that's going to hurt even more.
I work on AOSP, and I think it is ridiculous that Google owns so much of the eco-system [1] and continues to get praised for being "open" as well; very much like how this article seems to be praising them now.
Besides, whatever happened to proposing to a central body and getting stuff standardized (I get that its political and slow, and no ones like slow)? Google works with W3C to get stuff in the HTTP standard [2], with ECMA too [3], but seems to have problem engaging standards body for other things where it has a near monopoly. Not long after Chrome has taken over a large market share, Google would start treating W3C the same, if it hasn't doing been that already [4].
[0] http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/google-open-when-convenient...
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...
[2] http://www.tomsguide.com/us/google-spdy-http-internet-w3c,ne...
[3] https://brendaneich.com/2015/06/from-asm-js-to-webassembly/
[4] http://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-pointer-events-becomes...
/rant /offtopic
Really glad to see this! Hopefully soon I'll be able to buy dozens of these on the cheap for a serious project.
Feel free to hit me with beacon questions, I've got a bunch of varieties sitting on my desk right now.
Eddystone isn't alone; there's AltBeacon, which is also an 'open' alternative: http://altbeacon.org/ Though it looks like they might be 'merging' with Eddystone.
AltBeacon was born out of Apple giving Radius Networks a cease & desist about a year ago for reverse-engineering the iBeacon protocol and distributing an open-source Android toolkit (with paid enhancements) for iBeacons: http://beekn.net/2014/07/ibeacon-for-android/
The Android iBeacon code used to be on Github but is no longer there. IMO the core "infringement" (if there really is any) is about 10-20 lines of Java that unpacks an iBeacon (major, minor, uuid) from a byte buffer and another bit of Java that aims to map RSSI to Apple's simple model for estimating iBeacon distances. The library did wrap the functionality in a nice background-threaded interface, and their API is distinct from Apple's. On the iPhone, there's a BLE daemon that powers iBeacon and is rather crashy (at least as of iOS8). The Radius Networks solution was clearly distinct. The story would be a textbook example of Apple's legal department hurting open innovation except for the detail that Radius Networks was offering a paid developer product atop the open source offering. (But I doubt they were making much money from it).
There are a lot of problems with iBeacon technology:
* A lot of people have bluetooth off. The surveys out there have a lot of variance, and you typically have a 50/50 chance that a user with a very modern smartphone will have BLE enabled.
* Droid battery usage isn't too bad, but Apple's solution has a distinct advantage because the BLE daemon powering the feature can interop more closely with iOS and eat less CPU. It's really hard to get a consistent experience on both platforms.
* To do anything productive with the iBeacon (major, minor, UUID), you probably want to ping a webservice, which will be hard unless you have free wifi or you've made fancy deals with carriers (or Apple). And if there's wifi, you might as well just try to use that as a beacon (ala PayPal's product).
* You probably /dont/ want to have iBeacons trigger any sort of immediate advert or notification unless the user has previously opted in to the service. A lot of users are starting to not grant notification and other privs by default. Most users also do NOT like background location stuff. There are definitely user segments that differ, but you'll likely need to do a great deal of customer research to validate using iBeacon. If your app is payments, there's already NFC. If your app is marketing, you might get higher engagement with Augmented Reality or something tied to some other location service (ala Amex & 4sq).
Plenty of other companies EOL products.
Edit: Coincidentally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9888387
They own so much of the ecosystem because they produce 99% of the code. It continues to amaze me how ungrateful people are to Google and their AOSP project considering they're the ones spending millions on R&D each year, yet that still isn't enough for the vocal pro RMS minority.
If you worked with AOSP, you'd rather be more frustrated than grateful. Google is getting a lot of the bugs fixed for free! And its model has none of the downsides. Mind you, Google doesn't develop AOSP in the open. It releases source drops every other month or so, I think. There's a rumour that their internal branch and one that's open sourced isn't the same. If you'd recall, Google refused to release code for Android for Tablets (honeycomb) at all. So that's there too.
Damn if you do, damn if you don't.
The batteries don't last as long as advertised either, but that's pretty much been true for all of the devices I've tested.
>But you know what... if you don't sign the OHA we'd not provide any support, and if you do sign the OHA, then you must install our closed source apps).
Why would Google support a version of Android that refuses to pass the CTS? Do you really think Google would allow a device to use their services that was incompatible with Android? Also, why else would a company join the OHA other than to get the Google Apps and Services?
>If you'd recall, Google refused to release code for Android for Tablets (honeycomb) at all.
The code wasn't in a state to be released as it was incomplete. When they pushed ICS out they also included the Honeycomb source. So, it was released eventually.
>Google is getting a lot of the bugs fixed for free!
Would you by chance know the percentage of bugs fixed by people not employed by Google? I'm going to guess that percentage is very very low.
And even if a device passes CTS, Google would not automagically hand you the keys to the Google Play Services kingdom.
As for Play Store / Play Services is concerned, they've been moving a lot of code to closed-sourced APKs. For instance, the default browser was open source, now the default browser that's Chrome isn't. The default keyboard was, now it isn't. The Camera app was, now it isn't. They started out being more open than where they are now. And that's my beef with AOSP.
I don't have the count of number of bugs non-Google employees fix. The percentages may be negligible, but the impact is high-- They do seem to be looking at mods elsewhere (swipe to dismiss notification? battery percentage in the status bar? open apps from lockscreen? CyanogenMod had them first), and they did just brought in Knox from Samsung recently.
Also, I am not asking for free Play Store support, no sir; I am asking for an open and standardized integration of multiple appstores and related services. But I guess that's not possible (see first line), and elaborate hacks such as MicroG need to be put in place https://github.com/microg (a loosing battle, IMO).
Why they should give it? CTS has nothing to do with Play Services
This is not true