Beacon SDK

Help Scout's Beacon SDK allows you to embed the same Beacon functionality we have for the web inside your iOS app. Beacons provide a quick and straightforward way for customers to flip through your knowledge base or reach out to your team.

Requirements

Supported platform and language versions

• iOS/iPadOS 12.0 to 17
• Swift 5
• Xcode 15.0+

Installation

CocoaPods

Beacon is available through CocoaPods. To install it, add the following line to your Podfile:

pod 'Beacon'

Beacon is currently distributed as a dynamic framework so the use_frameworks! flag will also need to be present in your Podfile.

Swift Package Manager

Beacon is available through Swift Package Manager. To install it, simply follow Apple’s guidance for adding the Beacon-iOS package dependency in Xcode.

Carthage 🛑

As of Beacon 2.1.0, Beacon is (temporarily 🤞) no longer available to be distributed via Carthage. This is because Beacon is now distributed as an XCFramework which is (as of October 29th, 2020) not supported by Carthage. More info about the progress the Carthage team is making can be found on this issue or the following Pull Requests 1, 2.

Beacons up to version 2.0.2 can be installed using Carthage by adding the following line to your Cartfile and then following the Carthage installation instructions:

github "helpscout/beacon-ios-sdk"

Because of the way Beacon is distributed, attempting to use the --no-use-binaries flag when building will fail.

Manually

Beacon can be installed manually by linking the Beacon.xcframework. To do so, download the Beacon.xcframework.zip from here and add Beacon.xcframework to your Xcode project.

Additional Setup

Our developer site has information on configuring up your application to work with Beacon's email attachments and push notifications.

Sample Applications

This repository includes two sample applications, one written in Objective-C and one written with SwiftUI.

To run the Objective-C example you can cd into the Examples/Obj-C Example directory cd Examples/Obj-C\ Example, open Beacon Example.xcodeproj and run the BeaconExample scheme.

To run the SwiftUI example you can cd into the Examples/SwiftUI Example directory cd Examples/SwiftUI\ Example, open Beacon SwiftUI Example.xcodeproj and run the Beacon SwiftUI Example scheme. For it to run properly you'll need to provide a valid Beacon identifer on Line 10 of SettingsView.swift.

Documentation

See our developer site for more customization options available through the SDK.

Support

For issues or questions, contact Help Scout support at For issues or questions, contact Help Scout support at [email protected]