I know this has been asked many times, but things seem to evolve very fast and the answers seem outdated.
Is there a way to let iOS and Android communicate via a Bluetooth RFCOMM channel? Maybe opening sockets?
Unfortunately, this is impossible. RFCOMM is NOT supported on iOS unless the communication is encrypted through one of Apples' proprietary encryption chips. Since Android used "standards compliant" Bluetooth, and not Apple-encrypted Bluetooth, this won't work.
Related
I've been reading up on how to transfer data between iOS devices over Bluetooth using GameKit. I'm not writing a game, per se, but do have a need to transfer a small amount of binary data between two devices. Between two iOS devices, this is easy enough. However, I was wondering if it is possible to transfer data between an iOS device and an Android device via the same mechanism.
Has anyone come across documentation/tutorial that would explain how to do this? Is it even technically possible? Or has Apple put in some sort of restriction that would prevent this?
The other option I discovered was Bonjour over Bluetooth. Would this be a more suitable option for this type of operation?
This question has been asked many times on this site and the definitive answer is: NO, you can't connect an Android phone to an iPhone over Bluetooth, and YES Apple has restrictions that prevent this.
Some possible alternatives:
Bonjour over WiFi, as you mentioned. However, I couldn't find a comprehensive tutorial for it.
Some internet based sync service, like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3. These usually have libraries for several platforms.
Direct TCP/IP communication over sockets. (How to write a small (socket) server in iOS)
Bluetooth Low Energy will be possible once the issues on the Android side are solved (Communicating between iOS and Android with Bluetooth LE)
Coolest alternative: use the Bump API. It has iOS and Android support and really easy to integrate. For small payloads this can be the most convenient solution.
Details on why you can't connect an arbitrary device to the iPhone. iOS allows only some bluetooth profiles to be used without the Made For iPhone (MFi) certification (HPF, A2DP, MAP...). The Serial Port Profile that you would require to implement the communication is bound to MFi membership. Membership to this program provides you to the MFi authentication module that has to be added to your hardware and takes care of authenticating the device towards the iPhone. Android phones don't have this module, so even though the physical connection may be possible to build up, the authentication step will fail. iPhone to iPhone communication is possible as both ends are able to authenticate themselves.
Maybe a bit delayed, but technologies have evolved since so there is certainly new info around which draws fresh light on the matter...
As iOS has yet to open up an API for WiFi Direct and Multipeer Connectivity is iOS only, I believe the best way to approach this is to use BLE, which is supported by both platforms (some better than others).
On iOS a device can act both as a BLE Central and BLE Peripheral at the same time, on Android the situation is more complex as not all devices support the BLE Peripheral state. Also the Android BLE stack is very unstable (to date).
If your use case is feature driven, I would suggest to look at Frameworks and Libraries that can achieve cross platform communication for you, without you needing to build it up from scratch.
For example: http://p2pkit.io or google nearby
Disclaimer: I work for Uepaa, developing p2pkit.io for Android and iOS.
You could use p2pkit, or the free solution it was based on: https://github.com/GitGarage. Doesn't work very well, and its a fixer-upper for sure, but its, well, free. Works for small amounts of data transfer right now.
I've been looking at iOS 7's new P2P networking framework, MultipeerConnectivity, and from the description, it seems to me that it uses a combination of some kind of Wi-Fi Direct technology and Bluetooth PANs.
Is the Wi-Fi Direct technology in this framework compatible with Android's Wi-Fi Direct? Can this framework actually be used for cross-platform P2P networking?
This is what we know:
There's no BTLE/Bluetooth 4.0 advertisement visible on my Texas Instruments Bluetooth Low energy scanner.
No WiFi Direct activity seen by JuJoDi.
Talkkr app can connect while WiFi is off and the connection takes about 10 seconds.
My working theory: the MultiPeer uses Bluetooth Classic, based on the above.
iOS Bluetooth Classic is known to be under the Apple MFA Accessory API's tight control and lockdown, including the MFA authentication challenge-response. Apple controls the MFA encryption keys (either in software or by the accessory authentication chips). It makes it inaccessible to other platforms.
The device is not found by either when advertising or browsing with MultipeerConnectivity. Tried on Galaxy Tab 2:
No, the two are not compatible.
The MultipeerConnectivity documentation you linked to explicitly states (emphasis mine):
The Multipeer Connectivity framework provides support for discovering
services provided by nearby iOS devices
Although you may be able to hack together a workaround akin to the short-lived iMessage app for Android, I wouldn't recommend it.
Based on my experimentation with iOS 7 AirDrop, it doesn't seem to be using WiFi Direct. The transfer rates are very low indicating that it may only be legacy Adhoc WiFi (capped at 11 Mbps). Did you ever read Apple claiming to support Wifi Direct explicitly? Please read my blog post for details.
I am very interested in this subject as well and I came across these rather old links
AllJoyn
AllJoyn® is a collaborative open-source software framework that makes it easy for developers to write applications that can discover nearby devices, and communicate with each other directly regardless of brands, categories, transports, and OSes without the need of the cloud Source: https://allseenalliance.org/developers/learn
OpenPeer SDK
Open Peer is an open P2P signalling protocol Source: http://openpeer.org/open-peer-sdk-for-ios/
I haven't used any of these libraries but I am interested to add them to my simple game for the fun of it.
source
Peer to peer android and iOS with Wifi direct (multipeer connectivity?)
Maybe a bit delayed, but technologies have evolved since so there is certainly new info around.
As iOS has yet to open up an API for WiFi Direct and Multipeer Connectivity is iOS only, I believe the best way to approach this is to use BLE, which is supported by both platforms (some better than others).
On iOS a device can act both as a BLE Central and BLE Peripheral at the same time, on Android the situation is more complex as not all devices support the BLE Peripheral state. Also the Android BLE stack is very unstable (to date).
If your use case is feature driven, I would suggest to look at Frameworks and Libraries that can achieve this for you, without you needing to build it up from scratch.
For example: p2pkit.io or google nearby
Disclaimer: I work for Uepaa, developing p2pkit.io for Android and iOS.
I want to communicate my circuit (PIC based) with Android devices.
I tried to communicate using Bluetooth but it always ask to pair.
I tried to search more on communication where problem is,pairing is required.
Can i achieve communication without pairing? I found that pairing of devices is an essential factor.
Can i use Bluetooth 2.1/ 3.0 versions for communication?
Can somebody recommended any specific Bluetooth modules at circuit end?
Hope to get the right answers
-Abhimoh
I don't think that communication without pairing is possible at all.
I have used a Bluegiga WT32 module with a PIC. It works well, and communicates through UART.
Pairing is required, but easy to do.
The WT32 uses 2.1
This question already has answers here:
Is it possible, in principle, for an Android device to interface with an iPhone over Bluetooth/GameKit?
(7 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
First of all I am an Android developer, so the question goes to all the iOS developers.
Is it possible to achieve an Android <-> iPhone/iPad direct communication?
Some claim it is not possible, others claim it is.
I guess two possible technologies would be Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct is not recommended because it is not supported by Gingerbread and as far as I know, it is not supported by iPhone either (maybe iPhone 6, as I have heard from rumors)
It is already known that Bluetooth communication is achieved between iOS devices using GameKit and here is a reference.
I don't understand what is so special when communicating with GameKit??
Are the messages wrapped in some way with extra bytes at the beginning and ending of the message? Fine, we can wrap the messages the same way in Android!
Are the messages encrypted?!! And if so, could we decrypt them when they are received in an Android device?
Any ideas, workarounds, or other hackerish solutions are mostly welcome!
There are three frameworks available in iOS using which you can develop the bluetooth applications:
1. GameKit: This is the publicly available framework . But using this you can only establish and communicate between only two iOS device. So this framework having its own limitations .
2. BluetoothManager: This is private framework .I used this framework to discover the non iOS devices . I have established the connection also . But cant able to do the data exchange. I think it is still under development. For the reference you can refer this link
3. CoreBluetooth: This is also the public framework. This can only discover BLE enabled devices . I have successfully used this to transfer the data between the BLE enabled devices.
iOS does not implement any standard Bluetooth protocols that would allow it to communicate with other OS'es. GameKit is proprietary and if it were easy to hack it then people would have already done so (and Apple would have closed the hole).
Bluetooth LE is only supported by few Android devices (it is not in AOSP yet) so it is not really useful yet, even if it did support peer-to-peer.
I've read that it is possible to do what you are after via Wi-Fi direct, e.g. with this library:
https://www.alljoyn.org/
It says that it supports both Android & iOS - I haven't tried it myself, but it appears to do what you are after.
For devices on the same local network, Bonjour (a.k.a. zeroconf) can be a good way for processes on different machines/devices to discover and interact with each other.
See apple bonjour for android for some pointers to an Android implementation of Bonjour.
I have been searching for a while now and decided to post a question here to see if someone had already traveled down this specific road.
I am developing a bluetooth enabled device, using the Bluegiga BLE112 chip. They announce this chip to be easily used with iOS devices (and this was our main reason for choosing it)
The device will need to communicate with an App, that we need to be developed for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Due to this need, I've decided to use Rhomobile, as it seems to be the only one that supports developing BT apps for iOS without having to develop further plugins.
I only need to send small messages (like commands, small strings) and sometimes a bigger file to the device's internal memory.
On Rhomobile's BT documentation, they state that for iOS it is only possible to comunicate between iOS devices ( i'm thinking that they say this because of the MiFi limitations imposed by Apple, but that using Bluegigas chip are not a problem...)
My question is:
Since Bluegiga's documentation has examples of devices communicating with iOS using their chip, i should be able to develop using Rhomobile and not suffer from the limitation stated above. I wanted to be as sure as possible before making my company spend money ordering the chips and development board and what not..
Has anyone tried this, is my thinking missing something?
Thank you all for your time.
Daniel
Good Question, I think I can understand the reason for your confusion.
The main reason is many people/products/frameworks does not clearly mention if they are talking about Bluetooth Classic or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
These are both 2 different things and even thougfh they are called "Bluetooth" one cannot talk to the other.
(Some devices can be both Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy, which allows it to connect to either types)
Ok now comming to your Question :
THE bluegiga dongle is BLE
The Rhomobile is refering to the Bluetooth Classic version of the API.
On iOS the BLE APIs are open to applications, but Classic is limited on iOS , one way for Apps to use Classic Bluetooth on iOS is via the Gamekit APIs but that is possible only when talking with iOS devices, so it wont connect to another Android or Win device that is also Classic.
Needless to say with BLE APIs you cannot connect to calssic anyways.
The bluegiga examples are BLE examples, and apple also has good documentation and examples / samples on how to use BLE so yes it is easy to build a device and app using BLE on iOS.
There is nothing special abut any particular chip yo ucan use any BLE chip - there are many vendors today.
BUT Android (and I guess Windows as well) does not yet have BLE APIs for applications to use :( (Bit I think is is comming soon :))
So I hope this clears things up a bit.