can iphone act as beacon having eddystone format

Question

I read that Nexus6 and Nexus9 can only act as beacon in eddystone format. Currently I do not have either of the phones. I have an iphone, can we use aniphone to broadcast eddystone format?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is not possible. Apple restricts the type of advertisements that can be sent out by its CoreBluetooth APIs. While you can broadcast an advertisement with the same GATT Service UUID as required for Eddystone, you cannot attach the necessary data. This is because the CBAdvertisementDataServiceDataKey that associates service data to an advertisement is read-only on iOS. You can't set the data.

So while you want to make the iOS device advertise something like this:

0201060303aafe1516aafe00e72f234454f4911ba9ffa6000000000001

You end up advertising something like this:

0201060303aafe0316aafe

This leaves off the Eddystone-UID type code (00), the calibrated power (e7), the namespace identifier (2f234454f4911ba9ffa6) and the instance identifier (000000000001). As a result, it won't be recognized as an Eddystone-UID frame.