The release of iOS 7.1 has led to some hope that the new release will improve beacon background detection times. Repeating earlier tests on iOS 7.0 shows this not to be the case — it can still take up to 15 minutes to detect an beacon in the background.
These tests used a iPhone 4S recently upgraded to iOS 7.1 running an Beacon BackgroundDemo program available on GitHub. The same program had been used to test background detection times on iOS 7.0, and the full test setup and procedure is described in an accompanying blog post. For an beacon transmitter, the test used a Radius Networks Dual Beacon Development Kit (with two transmitters), that send out advertisements at a frequency of 10Hz when enabled. Cycling these transmitters on and off produced the following annotated log file (annotations start with #):
Continue reading this blog post on the Radius Networks website