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Im responsible of development of an app in which I need to scan for beacons, and so far support for iBeacon beacons only was enough and in order to do that I used CoreLocation to scan and retrieve data of the beacons which worked very good.

Now it is required to add support for scanning Eddystone beacons; but CoreLocation does not support this type of beacons. Hence, I must use CoreBluetooth to scan and retrieve data from Eddystone beacons, please refer to this very informative post from @davidgyoung for further understanding.



https://stackoverflow.com/a/41744019/6792878



So, since CoreLocation and CoreBluetooth are using bluetooth, I started to think of best practice to follow for scanning both beacons types as good as possible, I came up with the following:

  • Possibility of using CoreLocation and CoreBluetooth together, CoreLocation scan for iBeacon and CoreBluetooth for scanning other types (Eddystone in this case). But found nothing that stated or negates if they interrupt/affect each other’s scanner.

  • Ditch CoreLocation and Implement CoreBluetooth only scanner for both types, which will take harder work to dig deep in beacons details.

Masashi
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If you want to scan both iBeacon and other beacon types on iOS, you must use both CoreLocation and CoreBluetooth. They work fine together.

It is important to note that it is not possible to scan iBeacon with CoreBluetooth as iOS blocks access to the raw bytes of any packet matching the iBeacon format by returning an empty manufacturer data NSData object.

To see an example of these working together with no trouble, check out my Beacon Scope app for iOS which scans both iBeacon (with CoreLocation) and Eddystone and AltBeacon with CoreBluetooth. Turn on both beacon types in the vicinity and the app detects both at the same time. Indeed, the sample screen shots on the AppStore show this.

While the code for that app is not open source, the basics of how it scans for AltBeacon and CoreBluetooth are open source in the iOS Beacon Tools project.

davidgyoung
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  • Thank you for your answer again, seems you are stack overflow master of beacons Anyway, actually I checked other answers of you and Locate, I suspected that you implemented it using both, especially with Region related settings. But when I checked the tools, I skimmed it a little and saw it all using CoreBluetooth. – Masashi Dec 04 '18 at 21:17
  • I will check it tomorrow and will get back to you if needed. thanks again – Masashi Dec 04 '18 at 21:18
  • Yes, iOS Beacon Tools uses only CoreBluetooth. The point of the project is to provide beacon scanning functions with that framework. There is no special trick to using it at the same time as CoreLocation. – davidgyoung Dec 05 '18 at 10:53