Nordic beacons and iOS

RE: Nordic beacons and iOS

Christopher — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 19:49:22 GMT

Thank you for this post Asbjørn.

Due to changes in behavior in iOS8 compared to previous version (the Nordic vendor id is now masked out from the core location framework)

According to this answer, advertising frames are filtered by the Core Location API if the Company Identifier is not the Apple Id (0x004C). But we can still do a standard BLE scan and manually decoding the user information ?

The sample NRF51 Beacon application made for the pca20006 kit uses the iBeacon advertising format - with the Nordic Semiconductor company identifier, so technically this is an iBeacon, right ? But is the pca20006 MFi Licensed ? So can you use the iBeacon format or the Apple company identifier ?

The MFi licence is for hardware and software ?

Thank you for the clarification.

Regards, Christopher

RE: Nordic beacons and iOS

Asbjørn — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 08:53:12 GMT

I think this is a really good question and unfortunately we can't guarantee anything when it comes to Apple and their plans as it's outside Nordics control. However, I do not think that they will add any security chips and I don't think compatibility between ibeacon designs based on nRF51822 and iOS will be a problem. We try to adapt to what our customers need and for many of them connectivity to Apple based products is important so it's not something that we will ignore if something should be changed.

RE: Nordic beacons and iOS

ddkumar — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 22:02:37 GMT

Can we be assured that the Nordic Semi nRF51822 is still sufficient to implement beacons that are compatible with the iBeacon protocol? In other words, that Apple is not introducing a feature (for example, a security chip requirement) that would make it impossible to use the existing Nordic Semi solution? The reality is anyone can 'sniff' the iBeacon format and reverse-engineer the protocol elements since it is just a BLE advertising packet.