Research
Research notes
Everything the app claims has to trace back to one of these pages, and every page traces back to a primary source or to a test we ran ourselves. Statements are labelled as known facts, inferences or unknowns so you can see the difference.
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How Bluetooth detection works
The scan, normalise, match and score pipeline; why a single identifier can never reach high confidence.
Updated
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Where signatures come from
Provenance rules for every identifier in the catalogue, what the Bluetooth SIG registry proves, and what it does not.
Updated
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What iOS lets a Bluetooth scanner do
Apple-documented rules for foreground and background scanning, coalescing, relaunch behaviour and the eight advertisement keys.
Updated
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False positives and false negatives
Why company identifiers are shared across products, what that does to scoring, and how we plan to measure it.
Updated
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RSSI, proximity and distance
What signal strength can and cannot tell you, and why the app will never show metres.
Updated
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Testing results
No results published yet. The protocol, what will be published, and the criteria for publishing it.
Updated
How to read these pages
- Known fact: stated by a manufacturer, Apple, or the Bluetooth SIG, with a link to the page we read and the date we read it.
- Observed in our testing: measured on our hardware with an export file we can point to. There are none yet.
- Inference: a conclusion we draw from facts; we say why.
- Unknown: we looked and could not establish it. We do not fill gaps with guesses.
Related: the device database applies these labels to each product, and the FAQ answers the most common questions in short form.