How are Gimbals affected by the iOS 7.1 iBeacon monitoring update?

Question

I'm aware that with the iOS 7.1 update iBeacon monitoring through startMonitoringForRegion now continues to monitor even when an app has been killed or device restarted.

Is this same feature available with Gimbal devices when operating as a proprietary device, NOT an iBeacon? My understanding is that the interactions with Gimbal devices is handled by CoreBluetooth and not the CoreLocation iBeacon services so I am thinking that Gimbal devices do not benefit from this feature, but would love some clarification.

Answer 1

Gimbal devices in their default proprietary mode are incompatible with CoreLocation APIs. Simply put, they are not iBeacons at all.

They can only be detected with CoreBluetooth which has entirely different rules about background usage. Reading the identifiers is impossible without Qualcomm's proprietary SDK.

The CoreLocation improvements in iOS 7.1 therefore offer no benefit for out-of-the-box Gimbal beacons. To get the benefit, you have to jailbreak them to make them standard iBeacons.

Full disclosure: I am Chief Engineer for Radius Networks