Search for all iBeacons and not just with specific UUID

Question

Is it possible to search for all iBeacons which are nearby? I know it\'s possible to search iBeacons by UUID. But i want to find all iBeacons

Answer 1

Unfortunately you cannot at this time search for an arbitrary iBeacon without first knowing the proximityUUID value. I've tried writing directly to COREBluetooth and, although you can discover and connect to transmitting beacons in your area, what you get back is jibberish with no relation to the BLE UUID. So you can't even confirm that the peripheral you have connected to is in fact an iBeacon.

This does not appear to be a limitation of the BLE spec, rather it is a limitation that has been imposed by Apple. It also appears that this limitation does not exist for the Android platform.

Until this gap is closed, Android will have a significant advantage over iOS in this area.

I disagree with previous comments that scanning for UUIDs would be useless. On the contrary, if you knew the beacon UUID, you could create a map of beacon/location/subject in the cloud and use it to navigate (assuming the beacon was fixed) using a web service. You could crowd-source the data so that eventually a very rich database of beacon UUID/location pairs would be available to all who wanted to write location apps. Perhaps this is why Apple is hiding the info; they may be holding this back for their own purposes.