Eddystone (Google)

Eddystone is a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon profile released by Google in July 2015. The Apache 2.0-licensed, cross-platform and versioned profile contains several frame types, including Eddystone-UID, Eddystone-URL and Eddystone-TLM. Eddystone-URL is used by the Physical Web project, whereas Eddystone-UID is typically used by native apps on a user's device, including Google's first party apps such as Google Maps.

The format was named after the Eddystone Lighthouse in the UK, motivated by the simplicity of a lighthouse-signal and its one-directional nature.

Though similar to the iBeacon profile released by Apple in 2013, Eddystone can be implemented without restriction. Eddystone also contains a telemetry frame (Eddystone-TLM) designed for reporting on a beacon's health, including, for example, battery level. Like other beacon technology, beacons with Eddystone can give devices a better indication of what objects and places are around them. Importantly, beacons do not generally accept connections from other devices, meaning that the beacon itself cannot record what devices are in its vicinity. Further, the simplicity of the beacon frame means that an app (for example Google Chrome) is required in order to interpret the beacon's signal.

In tandem with the Eddystone, Google launched the Google beacon platform. The platform includes the Proximity Beacon API designed to associate content with individual beacons. The Proximity Beacon API fronts a registry of beacons where extra information (known as 'attachments'), useful to developers' applications, can be associated with individual beacon IDs. Several attachments can be associated with a single beacon. Attachments can be updated in real-time, and can be retrieved by an app using the Nearby API in Android (through Google Play Services) and the Nearby library for iOS.

Google developed the profile with several hardware vendors including Estimote, Kontakt.io, Bleshand Bluvision.