Using iOS GameKit's “Bluetooth Bonjour” with other platforms

Question

I\'m interested in connecting to iOS-based devices over Bluetooth. I can see that the \"Local Network\" service is exposed, but I cannot find any extra information about it.

Answer 1

Maybe a bit delayed, but technologies have evolved since so there is certainly new info around which draws fresh light on the matter...

The traditional GameKit has been replaced by Multiper Connectivity together with introducing support for WiFi Direct on iOS, however the framework still remains iOS only. I assume there is proprietary stuff going on in there.

Also, as iOS has yet to open up a direct API for WiFi Direct 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.

Answer 2

According to this interesting site : http://code.google.com/p/btstack/wiki/iPhoneBluetooth Apple are using a special chip besides their Bluetooth RF chip which denies any connection for a device without that chip - this means its a lock on the hardware level.