London, United Kingdom - 13 Aug 2015

Eddystone’s new feature set is the key to unlocking a host of emerging BLE Beacon verticals. As a result, ABI Research has forecast Eddystone to become the dominant standard in the BLE Beacon industry by 2020.

Principal Analyst Patrick Connolly comments, “The TLM broadcast is really where the innovation is in Eddystone, supporting transmission of telemetry / sensor data, which is key for IoT / smart cities, connected home, and industrial / enterprise applications. Broadcasting a UUID is old news but it provides continuity for those that are looking to develop their own app and have been considering iBeacon. What also makes Eddystone much more powerful than its predecessor, URIBeacon, is that success is not reliant on adoption of the Physical Web in the near term.”

Clearly the new feature set is vital, but Google has been clever enough to get major OEMs involved in the development stage, such as Estimote, Bluvision, Radius Networks, Onyx and Kontakt.io. As a result, Eddystone beacons are already deployed with a large network of evangelical vendors promoting the standard. Google has also created new APIs around the standard which also support hybridization with Wi-Fi and ultrasound.

Connolly went on to say, “There are few verticals where there is a case to use iBeacon over Eddystone at the moment. Eddystone is currently supported in Chrome browser on iOS. Apple could look to support deeper iOS engagement with Eddystone and the Physical Web, but is far more likely to respond with similar update to its own standard. In the meantime it can go on the defensive and try to limit or it can look to evolve the standard in areas such as accuracy, range and hybridization. This battle is far from over, but Google has looked at where the market is going next and produced a standard that can catalyze growth. While evolution is inevitable, ABI Research believes the current Eddystone feature set will become commonplace over the next 3 years.”

These findings are part of ABI Research’s new BLE Beacon Technologies and Services Market Research.