Meet Google’s “Eddystone”—a flexible, open source iBeacon fighter | Ars Technica

Article subtitle: "Google's cross-platform standard combines the best of iBeacon and The Physical Web."

"At this point some of you are likely saying, "This already exists! It's called iBeacon!" Apple's two-year-old iBeacon standard has a number of problems though, the main one being that it's a proprietary standard that only works with iDevices. This mean it's cutting out half of the US smartphone market and 80 percent of the worldwide smartphone market. When you're hoping to recruit companies to use this to advertise to their customers, immediately missing 50-80 percent of the possible customer base is a tough sell.

Eddystone is cross-platform—support is built into Google Play Services' Nearby API on Android, and it can be used via a library on iOS. Eddystone is also open source and is available on GitHub under the Apache v2.0 license (we'll update with links later once this all goes live)."

Meet Google’s “Eddystone”—a flexible, open source iBeacon fighter | Ars Technica