[Slartie]

The even bigger obstacle was apps not being able to broadcast beacon signals while they are in background. You could devise workarounds for the scanning problems, but this particular problem of having to be able to continuously advertise your beacon signals did not have a workaround AFAIK. The "workaround" was requiring people to have the tracing app active in foreground all the time, which obviously sucks from a UX perspective and means nobody will do it.

That's why this involvement is really huge and welcome! And besides clearing out existing arbitrary API limitations, Apple's involvement in potential protocol design for such tracing technology is a welcome addition in my view as well, because in contrast to Google, Apple at least earned a modicum of trust when it comes to putting the privacy interests of their customers first.

[petedoyle]

Also excited because they can likely push both advertisement and scanning into the BLE chips themselves, letting the rest of the system (CPU, etc) sleep. Big win for battery life.