The Bluetooth SIG owns the Bluetooth standard. It publishes the core specification and the profiles that define how specific device types behave, runs the qualification program that every product must pass before it can be sold as Bluetooth, and assigns the company identifiers and standard service UUIDs that devices advertise. Membership is required to ship a Bluetooth product, with a no-cost tier for smaller companies.
For IoT, the SIG’s most consequential decisions were Bluetooth Low Energy, which made coin-cell sensors and beacons possible, and later additions such as mesh networking, direction finding and audio. The trade-off of the SIG’s model is that profile development moves at consortium pace, so vendors often ship proprietary services first and standard ones later. See Bluetooth Low Energy for IoT for the technical side.
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