I absolutely agree with this. I pushed beacons really hard internally, and got a couple projects with them. Unfortunately, they're an absolute pain in the ass as far as reliability goes. One iPhone 5 detects the beacon immediately, the other has to sit around it for 3 minutes before it's detected, one can't detect it at all. Makes life pretty difficult when my only answer is "Is your bluetooth on?".
I hope that some OS level improvements give us some free reliability and performance increases. Supposedly Android recently got some updates re: beacons.
We at our company also tried to develop solutions based on beacons for our customers. The major hindrance to acceptance of beacons is people here almost always switch off bluetooth in their phones. I think phone designers should give 2 different switches for switching bluetooth on/off in the UI. One for traditional bluetooth and another for BLE. That way customers can be pursuaded to keep ble on.
Ahh yes, I totally forgot about the phones maybe, sometimes, probably could this time work and range the beacons. Half the time my suggested method for getting the ranging to work is to delete app, restart phone, turn bluetooth on/off, redownload app, pray, sleep, buy new phone... It's unbelievable how ridiculously inaccurate the system software is using CoreLocation out of the box. I've written a wrapper for it (https://github.com/Intermark/Buoy/) to make internal dev a lot easier, and even then it's a pain in the ass to find why this prototype isn't working.
I wonder whether the fault is at the iBeacon API/CoreLocation framework or the hardware beacons used? From your description above it sounds to me the hardware beacons are of questionable quality (low quality batteries and bad antenna maybe?)
I thought this too. But even with the plugged in RadBeacon (http://www.radiusnetworks.com/ibeacon/radbeacon/) and no EM interference between it and the phone, I was still getting extremely spotty results.
It's most probably a combination of all random variables (EM interference, beacon hardware, software, phone BLE antennae, etc) that makes it so frustrating and practically non-deterministic.
Have you tried emulating iBeacon with iDevice or a Mac? I'd consider those to have high quality Bluetooth chips and great antennae. If it is still not ideal, the blame could be on the software stack or maybe the whole idea is flawed :|
I hope that some OS level improvements give us some free reliability and performance increases. Supposedly Android recently got some updates re: beacons.