A war that isn’t one: NFC vs BLE

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In the last couple of years, there were quite a number of headlines about the war between seemingly competing technologies, Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Apple’s iBeacon specification, which was based on BLE, triggered all the headlines as Android platform has been supporting NFC for a while now (remember Google Wallet?). Technology media jumped on it and declared a war between NFC and BLE! For instance,Gigaom predicted “With iBeacon, Apple is going to dump on NFC.” As in most cases, both these technologies have their own unique uses while they seem to step on each other’s shoes. Apple Pay came along and its widespread adoption proved that to be the case. Apple Pay works on NFC technology. This doesn’t mean the demise of iBeacon either. Apple and other BLE vendors (Gimbal, Qualcom, Estimote, Kontakt to name a few) continue to image new avenues for iBeacons. And for techies, the world is ever more exciting.

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