Ok, there are a lot of things that can be considered when answering this, but I am just looking for a broad conceptual answer. Since iBeacon is considered proprietary, I assume it is frowned upon to use in Android apps. But my question is this:
Can I read iBeacons in an Android app without broadcasting them, or is that still a grey area?
I see that several apps in the app store use the iBeacon name and protocols, but am curious if they are allowed to, or if they got permission to use it maybe? Hoping someone on here has some insight on this... not looking for legal advice, just clarification if anyone knows better.
The only entity that would conceivably care about the use of iBeacon on Android is Apple, Inc. In the five years since coming up with iBeacon in the summer of 2013, to my knowledge no legal action has ever been taken against a publisher of an Android app that detects iBeacon transmissions, and I published one of the first ones in October 2013.
Why are there concerns?
Any Android app that wants to detect an iBeacon frame must have the equivalent of a 42 character beacon layout embedded in its source code, information that is widely available on the internet without having to agree to Apple's iBeacon license. I am not a lawyer and this is not a legal forum, so I make no comment on the legality of doing this. However, the practical reality is that thousands of Android apps do this, including Google Play Services, which is found on the majority of Android phones in the world.
Concerns have been fueled by Apple's iBeacon certification program, which began in 2014. It requires certified partners to agree to certain (then secret, now public) terms in exchange for showing the iBeacon certification logo. This allows Apple to wield the club of de-certification against anybody who violates these terms. To my knowledge, the worst Apple ever threatened to do to anybody who violated these terms is refuse to let them use their trademark iBeacon logo on their products. This is deemed important by companies marketing beacon products to ill-informed customers making the "iBeacon certified" logo part of their purchase decision. For app producers that are not certified partners and do not plan to be, this specific consequence is irrelevant.
Android apps made by companies signing the iBeacon license also commonly detect iBeacon frames, despite that fact that the language of that license (as publicly posted in July 2018 and dated as 9/10/2015) includes language which suggests that signatories are prohibited from doing so:
Licensee may use the Licensed Specifications, any other materials provided by Apple, and all other Licensed Technology, regardless of the source or manner through which Licensee obtains such materials, only to permit Licensed Products to interoperate with Compatible iOS Products in accordance with rights granted under this Use License, and not for any other purpose or in connection with any other products or services.
Further confusion of this subject stems from the retiring of the open-source Android iBeacon Library in July 2013 in favor of the Android Beacon Library 2. The replacement library will not detect an iBeacon frame out-of-the-box, requiring that a developer wishing to do so register an iBeacon layout with the library. Keeping this layout out of the library is an easy way to ensure that the Apache 2 licensed open source library is free of what Apple may claim is its intellectual property. (For far more serious reasons, Linux distributions in the 2000s similarly required users to separately install the DeCSS algorithm needed to play DVDs.)
Full disclosure: I am the lead developer of the Android Beacon Library and the author of the retired Android iBeacon Library.