IBeacons just don’t work as well with android because generally the phone app needs to be in the foreground all the time. But that’s why Google created Eddystone.
(Kontakt.io Went a different direction and created a piece of hardware, their “gateway,” which can detect their beacons and has a WiFi connection and can use webhooks including to IFTTT. It’s popular for warehouse use for object tracking, but I don’t know if they sell individual ones. It cost $89 when it was first introduced, but again, I don’t know if they sell individual units or not. They primarily aimed at the commercial market.)
Estimote IBeacons, and indeed most of the top brands, and can now be configured do use either the Eddystone standard or the original Ibeacon standard or both, but I don’t know if that’s true for the original generation. You would need to contact them to see if yours can be reconfigured.
Once you have Eddystone beacons, You should just be able to use the Beacon manufacturers SDK, which is why there are so few third-party apps, but if you don’t want to do that, there are a few apps in the playstore you can try. Just search on Eddystone, not iBeacon.
All of that said, it’s important to note that after a generation or two of android working with the Eddystone beacons, google decided that background scanning for them used to much battery life on phones, and they restricted how much scanning can be done. This is usually where are you will see reviews that say that an app doesn’t work with newer phones. The following is a good overview article:
All of that said, Eddystone beacons do have one interesting feature which will only work on android phones. When you get close enough to one, they can send you a notification without you having any app installed it all and that notification can be a link to any website you want. Choose the IFTTT maker channel as that website, and you end up with a one tap IOT proximity action. That is, you get close to your house, the notification comes up on your phone, you tap that, and your porch light comes on. But again, this will not work with iPhones because of apple’s security concerns. ( also, it gets trickier if you want to limit this to only some phones.)
I’m not sure, but I think there might be away with Tasker to grab that notification and make the whole process completely automatic without the tap required, but I leave that to the android experts. @joshua_lyon might know.
And for anyone who is a programmer and wants to write their own Eddystone app, here’s a good example of the process from a hackaday project report:
The Short Answer for Android
So the short answer is it’s way harder to write a practical Ibeacon app for Android unless you intend the app to always be in the foreground of the receiving station device. That might be useful for some IOT or accessibility use cases, but you’d have to be willing to commit at least one stationary android phone to being always on and running nothing but the beacon app.
If you switch to Eddystone instead of apple’s iBeacon protocol it will work better with android, but still not as well as an iBeacon/iOS setup, especially with newer versions of android where google crippled the background scanning feature to save phone battery life.