Estimote

I’ve used this app in the past to connect to my beacons with little or no difficulty. It was nice to be able to see remaining battery life and check for firmware updates. But now that my equipment is slightly older the app crashes whenever I try to connect to the beacons. Is this planned obsolescence?

Estimote has purposely made this app terrible to force their customers to pay $500 a month for their cloud service. Shame.

This app is a developer tool for users of the Estimote beacons and SDK, and is a promotional tool for Estimote beacons. It’s a good promotional tool. As a tool for testing and managing beacons it is functional but poorly designed, as you will discover the first time you need to walk around and try to use the app to make changes to dozens Estimote beacons you’ve deployed. Routine tests can be difficult to accomplish, some of the data (e.g. remaining battery life) is inaccurate, and there are no batch functions for some key procedures. But this app isn’t the worst part of working with Estimote. The company is the media darling of the beacon industry based on the very nice industrial design of their cute little beacons. Unfortunately their technology and customer service doesn’t is rather awful. One of the things that you will likely discover when you go around with this app to service your beacons: half of them will have fallen off wherever you stuck them. Estimote used the wrong self-stick adhesive, a fact that they have never corrected and never publicly admitted, presumably because they’d have to replace tens of thousands of defective Estimote beacons. If you stay away from Estimote you won’t need to worry about the quality of this app.