What Is Eddystone
Eddystone is an open beacon format developed by Google and designed with transparency and robustness in mind. Eddystone can be detected by both Android and iOS device. The Eddystone format builds on lessons learned from working with industry partners in existing deployments, as well as the wider beacon community. Several different types of payload can be included in the frame format, include:
Eddystone-UID: A unique, static ID with a 10-byte Namespace component and a 6-byte Instance component.
Eddystone-URL: A compressed URL that, once parsed and decompressed, is directly usable by the client.
What Is Eddystone-URL
Eddystone-URL is a component of the Eddystone specification for BLE beacons. The Eddystone-URL frame broadcasts a URL using a compressed encoding format in order to fill more within the limited advertisement packet. Eddystone-URL must be less than or equal to 18-bytes in length. In order to carry more data, we can compress URL. compress rules, the following data can be replaced by 1 byte.
If a web page is particularly long and has been compressed by over 18 bytes, should use https://bitly.com/ to shorten the URL and then add it to the beacon device.
Eddystone-URL can be used with nearby or physical web. Nearby notifications require the website to meet certain requirements, e.g., HTTPS-only, robots allowed, etc.
The following web link can test that the URL is supported or not.
https://beaufortfrancois.github.io/sandbox/physical-web/url-validator/
Nearby only scan beacons when the users turn on their smartphone’s screen. Therefore the notification might not appear until the user interacts with their android smartphone.
If your notification is not performing well (users rarely tap on it, or ignore it, which can be interpreted as the notification being not that useful), Nearby Notifications might stop delivering it to the users.
For Eddystone (URL/UID) broadcast, user can use free nearby/Physical Web/Beacon Tools for receiving notifications.
For iBeacon broadcast, users need Physical Web/Beacon Tools or a mobile app for receiving notifications.
