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Comment by xur17 | Hacker News Reader

It would appear that iBeacons just broadcast a uuid that clients can discover, and then clients are able to lookup the location of the device from a database. I don't have in depth knowledge of iBeacons, but after skimming the spec, it would appear that this does the same thing, so I feel like I am missing something.

How does this differ?

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> How does this differ?

Fundamentally, it doesn't.

AltBeacon (as far as I can tell) exists simply so Apple has a harder time using their bullying legal tactics against people.

Specifically, the folks behind AltBeacon (RadiusNetworks) previously made an open source Android library that allowed Android apps to easily detect and use iBeacons.

Apple threw their lawyers on them, and they pulled the Android library. Presumably, Apple will have a harder time being a bad citizen against AltBeacon.

I haven't been able to find definitive reports of this — I wasn't aware of it when it happened and am piecing together details I can find. If Radius Networks was producing commercial iBeacon products (SDK's) then Apple was within their rights to stop that.

To be honest, I think that is fair. I can't imagine this is preventing Android from using iBeacons. My opinion would be that it is preventing profiteering from something Apple a) has a trademark on and b) might want available for free.

I assume AltBeacon is the fallout from this. It would be nice if Radius and Apple could work together on Android support. Could be likely that its happening in Android OS already?

The RadiusNetworks library for Android was very good, I used it before at some hackathons on Google Glass and it worked great. They had a free version that was great and a pay version with extra features like conserving battery use. There is no chance in the world that Apple killed it because they wanted a freer version for Android. They pretty clearly didn't want any version for Android at all.

I don't agree with that. It may be the case that Android might bake it into the OS and most likely have a trademark agreement with Apple. There is no non-conspiratorial reason why Apple should completely shun iBeacon's on Android. All it will need is respect of the trademark — love them or hate them its the game we have to play at the moment.

Are there any non-commercial, open source iBeacon-compatiable libraries out there for Android? It would be handy to know if there are.

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