A Note from the CEO | Hacker News Reader

A Note from the CEO

developer.radiusnetworks.com

57 pointsismavis18 comments

That's too bad. Their Android SDK was quite good and they were very responsive with issues submitted for it. I used it at a Google Glass hackathon and working with Apple's iBeacon technology was super easy - probably why they are being forced to remove it.

This is what I used it for as well. If Android is unable to get Ibeacon support I can't see Ibeacons taking off.....As a retailer I would want a technology that the majority of my smart phone users can use, not 50% of them.

They'll probably be successful anyway. The iPhone has enough of a critical mass of (important: rich) people to be worth people's time.

This sucks.....luckily we can fork the library legally.

Does anyone have the old documentation cached anywhere? I'd love to take a stab at writing a client.

It's up on https://web.archive.org/web/20140626101055/http://developer....

Also, the download links to S3 still work and https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service still contains the old commits (HEAD~2) ... guess not everybody there supports the decision.

I'm sure this was a great response to a threat from Apple's legal machine.

That is actually a brilliant way for the dev to protest. The complete history is intact, so you just git revert and away you go. Thanks!

    git clone https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service
    cd android-ibeacon-service/
    git checkout HEAD~2

https://web.archive.org/web/20131202161126/http://developer....

Fork and revert https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/radiusnetworks.github.io/t... while you can

It's not totally clear to me if they were asked by Apple to do this, or if they're doing it proactively.

Either way, it's a bummer. Fork while you can :-)

I'm sure they were asked by Apple to do this.

Speculation, but this might be as simple as avoiding trademark infringement. In such case, releasing the product under new branding and avoiding use of "iBeacon" might be sufficient.

If there are IP claims as well it may not be so simple.

The good news is that there's no good way that Apple can stop Android devices (or other devices with BTLE) from broadcasting or detecting iBeacons.

Glad to see that the source code is still available to fork.

Is this Apple's latest attempt at blocking innovation?

(Apologies if I offend the fanboys / fangirls who think only Microsoft ever did that)

Kinda silly to accuse Apple of blocking innovation considering we're talking about a technology that they innovated that everyone now supposedly wants to use. Blocking use of their innovation on other platforms, perhaps.

All an iBeacon does is emit 160 bits of data at 1hz. That's not the sort of innovation that warrants disrupting so many others. Apple's behavior is strictly reckless and selfish here.

> we're talking about a technology that (Apple) innovated

Let's be clear here -- iBeacon is just Apple's marketing label for work that the Bluetooth SIG did.

Apple innovated nothing here, they simply starting using Bluetooth SIG's proximity profile at https://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/profiles/Pages/ProfileV... and slapped an 'iBeacon' sticker on it. Just like dozens of companies had done before them.

Thousands of people were already using this technology, producing and shipping hardware and software, before Apple even thought about jumping into this area.

To claim that Apple innovated beacons is a huge stretch. They've popularized them certainly, but they haven't invented or innovated any of the technology involved here (hardware of software)

If that is true, it is totally unclear to me why these docs coming down matters. :-/

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