It's still possible to have a general-purpose app for beacons, you just need to make that structured data available in a standard format on the Internet.
You could treat the UUID as a domain name, have a DNS-style system where an app looks up a UUID, gets some structured data, and caches it.
That does mean, for your bus example, that you would have to have seen one of those UUIDs before while internet connected, in order to have the route data already cached.
If someone is going through the effort of placing bus beacons, there's a good chance that the location either already has good data coverage, or they could place a wifi hotspot at the same time.
---
Alternatively, certain UUIDs could be taken to mean "connect to this device over wifi, and download structured information". This does have the battery issues mentioned in the article, but I expect that, for permanent installations, people will prefer externally powered beacons anyway.
Comments
It's still possible to have a general-purpose app for beacons, you just need to make that structured data available in a standard format on the Internet.
You could treat the UUID as a domain name, have a DNS-style system where an app looks up a UUID, gets some structured data, and caches it.
That does mean, for your bus example, that you would have to have seen one of those UUIDs before while internet connected, in order to have the route data already cached.
If someone is going through the effort of placing bus beacons, there's a good chance that the location either already has good data coverage, or they could place a wifi hotspot at the same time.
---
Alternatively, certain UUIDs could be taken to mean "connect to this device over wifi, and download structured information". This does have the battery issues mentioned in the article, but I expect that, for permanent installations, people will prefer externally powered beacons anyway.