I was hoping someone could spell out the relationship between iBeacon recognition, CoreLocation and CoreBluetooth, specifically in the context of what iOS considers "geo-fencing".
First off, I understand Apple's documentation on Using Regions to Monitor Boundary Crossings and have seen other discussions around the topic, like iOS - CoreLocation and geofencing while app is closed (especially pertinent to our app since this is a background operation). However, I'm having a hard time finding Apple's explicit definition of geofencing and exactly which frameworks get categorized as such.
Consider:
Beacons are based on BLE and yet they use the CoreLocation framework and not the CoreBluetooth framework. In fact, you do not need to add Bluetooth capabilities to the project settings in order to get them to work.
Detecting beacon regions uses the same object and method calls: to register a region, you call the ‘startMonitoringForRegion’ method of ‘CLLocationManager’ object.
It appears that once we added beacon recognition to our app, users have begun seeing "geo-fencing enabled" messages in their settings.
I thought geo-fencing was purely used in GPS- and Wifi-based location services? Not BLE services? The whole point of BLE beacons is to reduce the drain on the battery that geo-fencing produces.
On a higher level, is there any way to prove demonstrably that using beacon technology produces a much lower battery drain than other location-based geo-fencing? Using "geo-fencing" as an umbrella term for both (if that is indeed what is happening), muddies the waters significantly when making a business case for beacons.
