That trend is not visible in the mobile world yet. Broadband and modern browsers made it impossible for users to distinguish the so-called Web 2.0 apps such as Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs from their standalone competitors like Outlook or Excel.
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It was faster and cheaper for developers to design, build, distribute, and update web apps. Over time, most of these services moved to the web and were consumed by the internet browser, which could run on any computer, any processor architecture, and any screen. There was, for example, the FTP protocol and the FTP client app, IRC and its client, Usenet, Gopher, Mail, etc. There were many standalone apps exchanging data with servers using different data formats. So instead of having many different apps fetching contextual data, we might have just one, and it can simply be the web browser.Ī similar shift happened in the early ‘90s. Google recently released a different beacon format called “Eddystone.” Unlike iBeacon, it doesn’t broadcast only an identifier, but also a pre-programmed website URL.
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Eddystone by Google and the mobile webīut what if we want to interact with many brands and many airports or retail stores? Do we need to download all these apps? Not really. In order to maintain it, developers might either hard-code all the new data into the app and push the new version to the App Store, or the app might simply fetch the data from the server by passing beacon identifiers to CMS solutions, where marketers could keep the content up-to-date. When a user walks into a furniture showroom and approaches the sofa she likes the most, she can see the picture, description, or price on her smartphone. However, it’s one thing to broadcast a static identifier and trigger hard-coded actions and another to engage with users through dynamic app content. Or if she arrives at the airport and the app says exactly where to go and she is checked in by walking to the gate, that would be an amazing frictionless passenger experience. If a user boards a train, arrives at the destination, and gets a notification with the ticket automatically charged to her credit card, that would be a magical experience. That is actually why many app developers concentrate on delivering amazing value to users. When a user feels that the app shouldn’t use her location or that there’s not much value behind the app, she removes it.
By doing that, they allow app creators to push notifications to their phone or to use location services. That’s why users have to explicitly opt in by simply downloading their favorite store or brand app. Apple knew that powerful and frictionless experiences might also put users at risk of being spammed or tracked without their knowledge. That means this technology is opt-in only. That is the most beautiful part of this elegant design: an app searching for a specific beacon is required. When a phone discovers the beacon and picks up the identifier, it triggers an app and the action assigned with that beacon. They anticipated billions of devices advertising their presence, thus they designed the iBeacon format to consist of 20 bytes containing a static identifier (UUID + Major + Minor)-enough to number all the objects on earth. With beacon technologies, users just need to enter a beaconified location and a pre-programmed action will automatically appear on the screen-frictionless.Īpple made this technology elegant, privacy-oriented and straightforward.
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Before iBeacon, it was possible to use QR codes and pass contextual information to the phone, but it was inconvenient: pulling out the phone, opening a QR code scanning app, focusing the camera on the code, etc. The most important innovation was removing all of the friction in user interactions. For the first time in computer history, a massively distributed and popular consumer device such as an iPhone was able to sense micro-location information broadcast by tiny, battery-powered radio devices. It’s been almost two years since Apple launched iBeacon, its own beacon format, and kicked off the contextual computing revolution. Mobile & web apps and the future of beacon technologies In this (epic) guest post, he provides his thoughts and insights into the future of Web and mobile apps, the introduction of Google Eddystone and beacon support, and his vision for what it takes to bring digital context to the real world. Jakub Krzych is CEO and Co-Founder of Estimote, Inc. Guest Post by Jakub Krzych, CEO and Co-Founder of Estimote
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