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I have been using IBM Presence Insights to record indoor locations of my users' mobile devices. I am using a beacon infrastructure and used the Presence Insights SDK to build an app.

Will my app/phone range for beacons and send location updates to Presence Insights even when the app is in the background? What about if the app is not running? I need to know this behavior for both Android and iOS.

MBillau
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2 Answers2

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Did some investigation. The ability to range in the background is different for different operating systems.

For iOS:

  • iOS can monitor for beacons in the background using "region" monitoring. This is different than ranging for specific beacons because it monitors for a large region / group of beacons instead. This method does not drain the battery of the phone nearly as quickly and offers more privacy to the user. This is the recommended way to build a location based app from Apple and is what we do in the SDK.

  • Region monitoring works when the app is in the background, foreground, or killed entirely, see this link for more information: https://community.estimote.com/hc/en-us/articles/203356607-What-are-region-Monitoring-and-Ranging-

  • The link above talks about the limitations, most notably, that the user must have allowed permission to "Access your location even when not using the app"
  • When the phone is not in use, OR the app is in the background the SDK will monitor for these beacon ranges every 15 minutes maximum (this seems to vary based on iOS device, operating version level, etc.)
  • When the phone is IN use, and in the FOREGROUND, then it will be ranging for beacons continuously (the app developer shouldn't need to do anything to initiate this process.)
  • (To me this means there is a possibly that somebody can enter and leave a venue and not use their phone at all. If they did this within 15 minutes, they would not be detected at all.)
  • All of this monitoring can only take place if the user has downloaded the app and the app developer has "started" the PI beacon sensor. This is required so that PI can fetch the list of beacons associated with the org and register these beacon regions with the phone OS. For this reason, we recommend to app developers to start the beacon sensing as soon as the app is started.
  • I am not sure if this monitoring will survive phone restarts or not.

For Android:

  • Android does not have the concept of region monitoring that is provided by the operating system.
  • There is a background process we create that uses scanPeriod (how long you scan) and betweenScanPeriod (how long to wait before waking up and scanning BLE)
  • Currently, if the user opens the android app, we will create this background process that will run every 5 minutes and scan for BLEs
  • Currently, this drains the battery pretty bad because of these values
  • If the user force closes the app, it will close the background process, so scanning will not happen. We are looking at ways to fix this by restarting the background service when the app is closed
  • Android background processes do not survive phone restarts, so if the user restarts their phone and does not open the app, it will never scan for beacons

We are working to document all of this appropriately. There is currently a lot of active development in this area which makes keeping things up to date difficult.

MBillau
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The Presence Insights SDK for iOS and Android does not include any code specific to running your app in a background state - The way you write your application(s) will determine if and how they run in the background.

Here is some good info for iOS and Android on setting up background processes, as well as the docs for the mobile application SDKs. There are tons of options.

A word of wisdom - you can kill someone's battery if you are not careful with setting up background processes.

Hope this helps

Ben Rondeau
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