Combine iBeacon bluetooth low energy with Android 4.3

The only catch here is to detect beacon even the app is not running. Unlike iOS7, it is not natively support. In iOS7, when you on your BT, it will automatically notify you when you enter the region of registered iBeacon.

I had implemented iBeacon in Android 4.3 API using IntentService plus AlarmManager. To do a scan every 30 sec( to save your battery power, it shall be longer). It works well for user. Only when the matching uuid/major/minor is found, then it will trigger notifications. Otherwise, it will sleep and wake up for scanning again.

i think this is the solution for your question.

EDIT: The library below has been moved here:

https://github.com/AltBeacon/android-beacon-library

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I have ported the iOS7 iBeacon SDKs to Android, and was able to see standard iBeacons and estimate their range. The code is available here:

https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service

For this to work, you need Android 4.3 which introduced the Low Energy Bluetooth APIs. You also need a device with a low energy bluetooth chipset.

If you don't want to use the full library above, you can roll your own. iBeacons simply transmit a BLE advertisement once per second that start with a known sequence of bytes. You simply have to tell Android to do a BLE scan, get each advertisement, and look for one that starts with the known iBeacon byte sequence. You can then parse out the iBeacon fields. Here is the code the shows how this is done:

https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service/blob/master/src/com/radiusnetworks/ibeacon/IBeacon.java#L177-L231