Hey, 'sup

There's often a misconception about what information an iBeacon can broadcast. Basically, an iBeacon broadcasts its presence and nothing more. It says, "Hey, here I am", and nothing else. You can't broadcast data using iBeacon technology, and similarly, iBeacons aren't snooping into where you're going or where you've been. Any data that your apps require outside of the iBeacon identification must be retrieved from another source such as a bundled database or cloud service, as shown in the following diagram:

iBeacon app relationship

The best way to think about iBeacons is as a trigger for your app functionality. The trigger is based on the presence of a beacon or the relative distance of an iBeacon from your device.

iBeacons broadcast three values to help you identify which beacon your app is seeing. I call this the UUID/major/minor broadcasting triplet, discussed as follows:

The following table shows how this UUID/major/minor triplet might be used by Disney to develop a queue-jumping app at some of their Walt Disney parks and resorts:

A single multinational Disney resort's queue-jumping app could be used to determine your location and book your slot on the ride, provided you were located within the iBeacon proximity. As you can see from the preceding table, no information is passed to the device about the park or the ride itself; this information needs to be ascertained by the app from a different source such as a local database or cloud API before triggering the functionality based on that ride.