iBeacon monitoring/ranging issues with iPhone 11 and/or iOS 13

Question

Edit: Issue may be related to iOS13 - Detect if bluetooth is enabled without prompting bluetooth usage request

We have received reports from our users that use iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro that our application is unable to monitor/range iBeacons. We haven't received a report for any other device/model. We are assuming that this is related to the new Bluetooth 5.0 technology.

Our application uses the standard CoreLocation iBeacon setup, no other frameworks/libraries and I can provide the code if needed. However, since it's a standard set-up, I don't think it has anything to do with the code, especially since all other iPhone models work without any problem.

Has anyone had a similar issue? If so, any solutions? Also, is there a way I could test the Bluetooth 5.0 and iPhone 11/11 Pro without owning the actual device? Xcode Simulator doesn't have a way to do this as far as I know.

Thank you.

Sage

You might not have received the right permissions. It appears region monitoring is only available when permissions are always given, take a look here: developer.apple.com/documentation/corelocation/… – Builder

I double-checked but everything looks fine permission-wise. It's important to note that some iOS 13 devices have no issue, including my own. Also, we have around 10,000 iOS users that have no issue as well, so I was assuming this may be related to iPhone 11 and/or Bluetooth 5. – Superfluous

Answer 1

I have faced this type of issue on a new iOS update. The issue was with iOS.They fixed it in subsequent release.

There are couple of ways to test it , but you need to have the iPhone and the remote device(running BLE 5.0 stack). 1. Use Ellisys sniffer tool, to monitor the protocol sequence exchanges 2. use Apple test System, to validate the data flow from Macbook and the remote device.

Possible recommended approach is to create technical defect with iOS and provide the required logs and follow up with Apple. There is also beta IOS program, which you can use to test against future upcoming iOS releases to avoid these sort of problems

Vicinity