Yesterday Google announced Eddystone, an open-source alternative to Apple’s iBeacon protocol. Apple introduced the iBeacon protocol in 2013 utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a solution to enable proximity for phones. With Eddystone, Google has now unveiled its own take on the already-established iBeacon protocol. While both Eddystone and iBeacon are very similar, both being BLE advertising packets, Google has chosen to make Eddystone a more open and extensible protocol. Also, by supporting Eddystone in its Nearby APIs, Eddystone beacons will be able to interact with apps other than those made by the venue.

The engineers at Aislelabs have been hard at work, playing with the Eddystone protocol. We are proud to say, the Aislelabs product suite now fully supports the Eddystone beacons. Google’s new beacon protocol can be understood by both our mobile SDK components and our backend cloud infrastructure. The new beacons can now be used for proximity via the Aislelabs Engage platform. We are also going to support managing the Eddystone beacons providing tools for deployment, configuration and monitoring from our platform. Integration with Google’s own APIs and third-party APIs will also be available.