The Story of Beacon

Beacon is no longer available. The iPhone is now powerful enough to run more featureful apps very efficiently. You should use one of those apps.

You can see the original Beacon description here.

When Beacon was first submitted to the App Store, there were basically no apps in the “Navigation” category, so there was very little competition. Beacon rose quickly in the App Store.

Within a few months, Beacon became the “#1 Free App” in the Navigation category. When Apple changed the category icons to be top apps in each category, Becaon was the first Navigation category icon. Beacon appeared on the home screen in Apple ads.

Beacon was hosted on the Apple Developer account of a good friend. He accidentally let his account lapse, and Beacon disappeared from the store.

I, and a mysterious man named Andreas who randomly started sending me graphics one day, did a lot of work on a replacement app. By the time it was ready, however, the Navigation category was full of much better apps. In its heyday, Beacon remained at the top of the chart due almost entirely to already being at the top of the chart.

Beacon came back to the App Store when my friend reinstated his Apple Developer account a long while later. By that point, it was hopelessly outmoded, and I didn’t update it. It continued to collect terrible reviews until the day my friend mercy-killed it.

At the time, reading from the iPhone’s GPS antenna was…. not great. When you first opened the connection with CoreLocation (Apple’s navigation API at the time), you’d get location data immediately, but with comically low precision (around 250 m radius, meaning you easily could have dropped a pin three football fields away from where you intended). Location precision improved the longer you had it open, but it took 30+ seconds to get to a usable accuracy (sometimes 30 m was the best you could get, meaning it could still be off by almost 100 feet).

Determining your current heading was similarly obtuse; the user was expected to spin in a circle for an uncomfortably long time before the reported heading matched reality. But unlike location, there was nothing to indicate when the iPhone switched from guessing to measuring heading.

I have no idea what the modern location API is like, but I suspect it does better than pointing you three footfall fields away in the wrong direction.

At the end of every Very Special Episode there’s always a scene where they talk about what we learned today. Maybe it was a lesson in the significance of being first? Maybe it was a lesson in the complexity of mobile app design… except there were fewer than 500 LOC in that repo, including shell scripts. Maybe it’s a lesson about how you too can create the Next Big Thing… except Beacon thrived for two seconds mainly because there was no competition, not because it was quality software (it wasn’t). Perhaps the lesson was about how I didn’t charge any money for it, so at least I don’t have to live with that guilt.

Either way, I do other stuff now, none of which is a shoddy iOS app.