Is only Apple allowed to build hardware iBeacons?

Hello everyone,

after some people raised an interesting and I think important question concerning iBeacons as comment on my blogpost http://www.mkroll.mobi/?p=1120, I decided to write a post regarding those questions only. Feel free to comment on this post or start a discussion in the forum at http://forum.mkroll.mobi/viewforum.php?f=17 where I opened an iBeacon related area.

So back to the question raised on the blogpost which was originally:

I think this is correct, but there are some iBeacons commercially available already, such as:

• http://roximity.com
• http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/ibeacon/ibeacon-development-kit.html
• http://www.getbleep.com
• http://kontakt.io
• of course I have a firmware for the BLE112 module of Bluegiga: https://github.com/michaelkroll/iBeacon112

Now the question is still somewhat unanswered. Are companies allowed to create iBeacons using Apple’s Company identifier for commercial products? There are still no documents officially provided by Apple describing how to manipulate a BLE device to act as an iBeacon, maybe the company identifier is the reason for that?

Thanks for any insight on that,

Michael.

Addition as of 12/6/2013:

Hello all,

thanks for the discussion in this topic here on my blog and twitter as well. While listing some iBeacons available in the web, I don’t wanted to blame anybody about what they are developing. I’m working on an iBeacon as well based on a BlueGiga BLE112-A module. I was just a question risen by some others 🙂 My intention was to open a discussion an get as much people involved dealing with this technology. As a main result I can say “Only Cuppertino knows” 🙂

Cheers and many thanks for participating in this discussion,

Michael.