Beacon Support

A few years back I had Radbeacons configured to auto change rooms. Did they remove this feature?

Apple abandoned that many years ago so eventually we did too. If they ever figure out what they are doing for interior location tracking, we’d love to add it back. But clearly, iBeacons wasn’t going to be it.

On looking into this a bit further, it seems like Apple went the commercial route here with a program called Indoor Maps in 2019 as I now recall. Right now, they say anything smaller than basically a museum is not really appropriate for the program. I would not be surprised if that finally changes soon. I recently used this at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas and it was very cool being able to use Apple Maps inside the entire facility including the Find My stuff. But working well inside a home could be a different story. Regardless, it doesn’t use iBeacons. Rather, it seems to be entirely based on relative Wi-Fi signal strength.

Even if I ignore the “museum” guidance, it does not appear that we could provide a generalized solution to allow homes of any user to work with this. We need to register the locations, map them, and submit them to Apple which currently requires humans at Apple to correlate your GPS location to your indoor map. However, if Apple were to expand/automate this in the future, this seems like the direction they are going.

https://register.apple.com/indoor#:~:text=Apple's%20indoor%20positioning%20technology%20passively,your%20Wi-Fi%20access%20points.