[Atotalnoob]

Bluetooth on android is quite terrible.

Especially BLE, a startup I worked at had a device that broadcast every 500ms for 375ms. We tested over 100 android devices and the best phone had a 40% chance of detecting the device within 5 seconds…

[dns_snek]

Any interesting observations with respect to different brands? What does the overall distribution look like and how does it compare against other devices you tested, e.g. iPhones, laptops?

[Atotalnoob]

Our app was specifically only for androids.

We didn’t test anything other than androids, my work laptop, and software defined radios.

Different brands, I recall Samsung devices being the worst on average. I believe the better Bluetooth devices were actually nexus/pixel phones… I think the top, by far, was the nexus 9, but it’s been a while.

The product was pretty cool that we built. It was essentially tile or Apple AirTags before both of those were around and ruggedized for usage in commercial usage to keep track of items (dumpsters, underwater diving equipment, mining equipment, portapotties, etc). You’d be surprised how easy it is for some of these companies to lose a dumpster or something else of considerable size and mass.

Building the mesh network and algorithms to determine if someone passed by, moved, etc the item the beacon was attached to was pretty cool stuff.

We also didn’t want to use data as much as possible, but the final determination of “what happened” to the item needed to be server side to ensure we took into account scenarios like 2 unrelated items traveled together for 2 miles, then went their separate ways. So we had to optimize for data, geo, temporal, spatial data, etc.

Given the speed a vehicle might travel and Bluetooth range, you could have 1-5 bbroadcasts to detect a beacons presence and update its location so missed detections were critical.