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Comment by josephlord | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if this appears as an iBeacon to iOS devices? You can get iOS devices to listen for other BLE advertisers (or advertise their UUID) in the background (even after the app is closed due to memory pressure) but I haven't been able to make it survive a phone reboot.

If anyone can get that working please let me know.

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AltBeacon will not register as a CoreLocation Beacon on an iOS device.

Full disclosure: I work for Radius Networks.

So how do I deal with supporting both Android and iOS from a single Beacon?

I believe the easiest approach would be to broadcast both formats.

Interested to know how you intend to do that with all the advertising space already used up by one of the beacon advertisements?

One option is to alternatively switch between both broadcasts on a single radio.

You broadcast a single iBeacon-only message, sleep for a few hundred miliseconds and then broadcast a new AltBeacon message.

The beacon does this so quickly, that it's usually sending out two or three of both kind of messages every second. It's effectively an iBeacon + AltBeacon in one device.

You can use this example to send this example code on github to run multiple advertisers. (May be a bit of overkill to just send 2 kinds of beacons but does provide accurate timing control over the beacons). http://nordicsemiconductor.github.io/nRF51-multi-role-conn-o....

However it is really a waste of energy to send 2 types of beacon packets when one should suffice. However it is technically possible.

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