All around the world, smart developers keep building iBeacon apps that help navigate shopping malls and sport stadiums, provide contextual information in museums, or let you order food to your table straight from your phone. At the same time, many engineers set out to implement entire platforms that make it easy for non-developers to benefit from the contextual computing revolution—be it content-for-real-world management systems, mobile payment services or smart office solutions. With today’s release of OAuth support in Estimote Cloud, these platforms can now make it easy for their users to grant them access to their beacons. Just like Spotify can populate your friend list from Facebook, it’ll now be super simple to automatically download a list of your beacons to your favorite CMS, let it manage their settings for you and tap into the whole power of Estimote Cloud—all through the third-party dashboard.
OAuth support is in beta right now: shoot us an email for access.
OAuth-what?
At the dawn of the Internet, if you wanted a third-party to access your account, you had to give them … your password. Yes, dark ages indeed.
Okay, this was actually from 2010 …
Obviously, such an approach comes with numerous security implications. You give away full access to your account. There’s no way to revoke it without changing your password. If you do change your password, you have to re-equip every app with the new one. Really, don’t try this at home.
Fortunately, the Avengers OAuth came along to remedy the situation. OAuth is an open standard for authorization which provides client apps (like the website above) a secure access to resources (posting a new tweet) on behalf of their owner (oh hey, that’s you).
But as it turns out, OAuth proved to be about much more than just securely allowing other apps and websites to access your account without giving up your password. Together with open APIs, they became to apps what hyperlinks are to web pages, helping make the web more interconnected than ever.
The world of connected apps
A code inspection tool that taps into your existing GitHub repos, instead of having you upload the code? A live-streaming app with a Twitter-powered chat, so that you don’t need to build yet another social network? An analytics dashboard for Instagram, making it possible for brands to use it as another marketing channel?
All of this wouldn’t be possible without open APIs. They allow developers to create entirely new apps on top of existing platforms, extending what’s possible—sometimes in ways the original maintainers of the platform wouldn’t even imagine. And this in turn attracts users. Could I host my git repositories anywhere? Sure thing, but then I’m missing out on somanyawesometools that easily integrate with my GitHub repos thanks to GitHub’s RESTful API and OAuth support.
At Estimote, we love our Slack integrations, and none of us can imagine an iPhone without an App Store. We want to give our community of makers the very same freedom to extend and build on top of our platform. More than that, we’re confident that iBeacon can only ever reach mass-adoption if there’s a thriving ecosystem of diverse apps and tools to easily enable contextual experiences.
Earlier this year we opened up our fleet management API, so that you can come up with your own beacon management tools or integrate them with your own platform. This means you’re no longer tied to Estimote Cloud’s web dashboard or our Estimote iOS app for fleet management, but can still utilize our infrastructure without building everything from scratch. It comes alongside the remainder of our RESTful API, which also gives you unrestricted access to powerful analytics and detailed information about your beacon network (like UUIDs but also e.g., remaining battery life estimations).
Today, we’re adding OAuth support to Estimote Cloud, so that connecting third-party apps and platforms with the Estimote Platform becomes easier than ever. Just imagine that your users can authorize your app to access their beacons with just a few clicks. This feature joins our private beta, so don’t hesitate to apply for access.
How does it work, and what’s in it for you and your customers?
From the end-user perspective, it’s just like any other OAuth authorization flow you’ve seen on the Internet, e.g., when connecting your Airbnb account to your Facebook account.
Once you’ve integrated your platform with our OAuth service, your customers can simply log in to your panel, click the “connect with Estimote Cloud” button and get redirected to Estimote Cloud to grant your app access.
One click of the “Allow” button later and they’re being redirected back to your site with a special code. You can redeem this code for an authorization token that’ll allow you to use Estimote Cloud’s RESTful API on behalf of the user.
What are some of the things you could do? Maybe you’re building a specialized CMS system and want to fetch a list of beacons, so that your customers can easily tie content to particular contexts without having to manually input all the UUIDs. Or maybe you’re working on a smart office platform, and want to automatically group beacons in individual offices by their major values. Just queue up remote changes to beacons’ settings—and if you’ve already implemented remote fleet management via push notifcations in your own app, have them propagate immediately this way.
Think about all the value you can provide to your users—abstracting the complexities of the iBeacon technology away and making it easily accessible to marketers, office managers and other non-developer folks.
The story goes on
We’re committed to our developer-centric approach and will keep providing you—the makers—with tools to help push iBeacon technology forward. Whether this means adding support for mobile apps to our OAuth flow, so that users can grant you access to their beacons directly from your mobile app; alternative ways of allowing access for those of your customers who didn’t sign up for an Estimote Account; or even a seamless way to order Estimote Beacons via your own platform, we’ll work hard to keep our platform open and make it more extensible than ever. Share your feedback on our forums, email us your questions or ping us on Twitter with quick thoughts.
If you want to access the beta version of OAuth for Estimote Cloud, let us know!
Piotr Krawiec, Technology Evangelist at Estimote
Arek Flinik, Senior Software Developer at Estimote