I am actually surprised that the Bluetooth consortium just lets Apple re-brand a very limited use of BLE. Namely sending an ID, not really such a feat... Let say it like this: If you buy a development kit from, say, Nordic, their example applications have more functionality.

Especially that Apple is licensing this technology, https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/, is totally ridiculous! Moreover, they are patenting this kind of stuff: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2014/05/apple-gr.... It's a sad world. I'm glad I've already demonstrable some code online: https://github.com/mrquincle/bluenet which dates from before these patents.

Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. We also developed an Android client using the Estimote open source SDK, we're planning to pubblish that on Github as well. Since iBeacon is just a fancy word for saying B4LE, Android devices that ship with Bluetooth 4 chips work just fine.

iBeacon is an Apple-defined BLE protocol - there's no reason you can't use it on Android, and we build apps that do exactly that.