Hi Max,

Yes, you basically figured it out correctly — iBeacon is a proprietary protocol developed by Apple and is natively supported by iOS devices. It is very popular, and it is common to also use the name iBeacon when you talk about hardware that implements this protocol.

Eddystone is another beacon protocol, which evolved from another protocol, called URIBeacon, and as far as I understand, was created as an open alternative to iBeacon. Eddystone also has some featured not supported by iBeacon, such as broadcasting a URL (hence the Physical Web) and telemetry data (such as temperature).

Gimbal, mentioned in this article, also has their own proprietary beacon format. However, you can configure their hardware to use the iBeacon protocol instead of their format. I found an interesting read that outlines some of the differences between the two formats.

In this article, I decided to go with the iBeacon format mainly because of the iOS support and the popularity of the hardware implementations. You can also use Eddystone or any other kind of BLE device that constantly broadcasts, but if you are an iOS user, you will probably have to create a custom app to notify you when the beacon is in range, and you will have to keep this app running in foreground in order to get the notifications.

I hope that this helps, and I am really happy to see that the article managed to ignite your interest in beacons :-)