Some beacons are only detected in Foreground or with the display on

Question

We have been developing our own solution, we are creating two different apps, one for IOS and another one for Android.

We've just discovered we have some problems with some beacons, we have several brand beacons (Estimote, Kontakt, home made ones, and some of one spanish seller)

All Virtual, HomeMade and Estimote are working perfectly. They are detected in foreground, in background and of course when the iphone screen turns on.

But Kontakt and the spanish one not. They have in common, at least what we know, that they need a password in order to access their services.

We have tried everything. As I said, the other ones are detected perfectly, but not the Kontakt ones and the other ones neither.

Anyone with Kontakt beacons knows how to make them work in background?

Answer 1

From my limited experience with Kontakt.io beacons, I have seen that they do not advertise their presence as frequently as the 10-30Hz iBeacon standard. While slower transmission rates can help make battery-powered beacons last longer, it can slow down background detection on iOS.

Understand that when an iOS app looking for iBeacons is not in the foreground, iOS only does a brief Bluetooth scan periodically to look for iBeacons. If a beacon is not transmitting at that time, it will not be detected. When an app is ranging for iBeacons in the foreground, there is a constant bluetooth scan, so there is much less of a chance of missing infrequent beacon transmissions.

I suspect that if you wait long enough (many minutes or even hours) in the background, the Kontakt.io beacons will eventually be detected. You might check to see if Kontakt.io offers a config option to increase the transmission frequency to help this.