How well does the Android NFC API support Mifare Desfire?

Question

I\'m likely to be working on a project where existing Desfire cards (used to access paid services) will be replaced with an NFC-capable mobile device. Can anyone point me to

Answer 1

Given your situation, i would say Android SDK is more than sufficient to solve your problem. There are two parts to your case:

1. Reading the information from the existing cards.
2. Making an app with the information you have read from the cards.

Part 1:

Your only worry has to be in reading the DESFire card. If the information in the DESFire card is stored in NDEF format, it makes things even more easy.

Ndef is a class in the SDK which can be used to retrieve the information in NdefMessage type which you can then use to save the retrieved information into your storage facility, be it a local database, or a remote database, or just in the application memory.

The above is under the assumption the card is not protected. If it is, then you have to use transceive function to interact using raw byte communication. This would unlock for the rest of the information to be read. From here you can read the NDEF records.

Part 2: My suggestion is skip the card emulation aspect of it. You are going to hit a wall at some point in time.

If the device that has been reading the card in the existing solution is attached to an android device, then Android Beam is the way to go. Which is nothing but Android App to Android App communication! Android already does the heavy lifting, so most of your work is going to be easy.

The information on the card can be stored as ndef messages and sent through beam, or you can simply create a custom object and send it through.