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I'm trying to understand how dependable / frequent background detection of beacons can be while our app is running in the background. If our app is running in the background, it is my understanding that iOS does BLE scan every 15 minutes, even with iOS 7.1 (http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2014/03/12/ios7-1-background-detection-times.html). However, Gimbal is advertising (https://gimbal.com/doc/proximity/ios.html#background_behavior) that the expected time to arrival for iOS 7 is an average of 7 seconds for their series 20 beacons. These transmit every 100 milliseconds, just like what was used in the referenced link.

Is Gimbal's documentation accurate? If so, doesn't this mean that they're forcing a scan at a much more frequent interval which would drain battery life?

BoilerJoe
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  • My experience with iBeacons and beacon monitoring is they seem to act in the same exact fashion as normal region monitoring, meaning you'll get the region enter/exit events within a few seconds most commonly, but sometimes it can take a minute or two depending on the device. – Mike Aug 31 '14 at 03:27
  • The 15 minutes mentioned in the article is only for the conditions under test. Detections often can be faster. Take that number as a worst-case scenario. As for Gimbal's claims, I would be skeptical of any marketing literature, as it is often based on best-case scenarios. I do not believe their beacons have any ability to influence iOS background scan times. Better to test yourself to see what delays you get. – davidgyoung Aug 31 '14 at 04:20
  • @davidgyoung I agree, we will be doing our own tests. Like you said, 15 minutes would be the worst case scenario (probably more like 14.5 minutes, if iOS scans for 30 seconds every 15 min). Given this, the average time to arrival should still be around 7 minutes. I'm going to be working on the Android side of things, and will probably be using your AltBeacon library (thanks!). In our use case, we only need to see a single beacon, so I'm hoping that I can play with the scan period and time between scan period to get this to work well (looking at your comments in BeaconService.java). – BoilerJoe Aug 31 '14 at 17:34

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