Locked iOS device scanning for BTLE devices

Question

Can an iOS device scan for presence of Bluetooth LE devices while locked and then respond to them by opening the app?

Answer 1

The scanning can definitely happen in the background.

In order to get the functionality that you're talking about the comment by owen is correct. I'll expand on it a bit.

What we do is when we recognize a BLE device that we're interested in and would like the app to open we send information to our server, from where we have the option to send a push notification if the user wants. This could probably also be achieved with a local notification set a few moments in the future. From there the standard rules apply for push notifications, if they opt to look at it your app can be opened and you can respond to the proximity of the BLE device that initially triggered. The user always has the option to ignore the notification though.