Is it possible to simultaneously broadcast my iOS app as an iBeacon and at the same time publish a service?
My app currently advertises a service, which works perfectly fine. My client app (central) is able to find the peripheral, connect, obtain the service and read data from the characteristic. However, if I update my server app (peripheral) to start broadcasting as an iBeacon emitter in addition to the service, I am no longer able to find services that I setup to advertise on the client app (central).
The idea of this is that I want to be able to read information from the server (peripheral) app when in close proximity from the client (central).
Is this technically feasible?
I was thinking about turning off iBeacon transmission when a device comes into close proximity and then starting the service broadcast, but there is no API in Core Bluetooth that calls back to the emitter when a client device enters the region being advertised.
Is this doable? Is there a workaround that would achieve something along these lines? I would like to avoid any networking, as this should be an offline solution.
Taz, For sure you can be an iBeacon and you can look for iBeacons. What I did and what I see other doing is combining iBeacons with other services, such as the CloudKit [which yes, means networking too] to add functionality to their basic functionality.
That said I can imagine an app in which your iBeacons switch to a different protocol when they see each other, the challenge; how-to negotiate a channel/UUIDs for a BLE peripheral/central pair.
I am still in the process of building, but have implemented something similar over the past months... in short you hardcode an initial channel to start your BLE conversation, your first and only exchange on said channel being to agree a new BLE one to use.
Related
I have got a chip that has a iBeacon service as well as a standard BLE service.
I would like to use the iBeacon service to trigger the app that I am developing when entering a BLE signal range.
Once active I'd like the app to scan for peripherals using CoreBluetooth and then connect to the chip.
Is this against Apple terms and conditions?
Apple has no known restrictions on this setup. In fact, this is how the RadBeacon configuration app works.
Using this technique, detecting a beacon in the background will only give your app 5 seconds of background running time, which generally is not enough time to reliably complete Bluetooth pairing and data exchange. Your best bet would be to present a local notification to the user on beacon detection, and then if the user brings the app to the foreground, do the pairing.
An alternative would be to extend background running time using a technique like described in my blog post here. That post shows how to range for beacons in the background, but the same technique will work for bluetooth communication tasks.
For a project I need many clients to subscribe to different hardware devices. In this setup the clients are iOS - Devices. The hardware is something like a raspberry pi but i don't think this matters. This hardware devices send a signal if it measures some kind of information. This is a rare event and possibly could never happen.
Purpose of the app is to warn the user when some kind of event appears in a location he is interested to.
I planed to implement this using the MQTT protocol.
That is where my problem is. To work with MQTT the app needs to send PINGREQ every few minutes even when the app is in background. Also the app needs to receive its subscriptions and handle them immediately.
This is what I planned to do:
Set the "UIBackgroundModes" key in Info.plist to "voip".
Mark the socket as voip socket to wake the app when it receives something
Set the keepAliveTimer:callback: and send the PINGREQ
.. as described here
My questions are: Will Apple allow this? My app is not an VoIP app. If no, are there any alternatives to this approach?
If Apple policies doesn't allow your to put your MQTT client App running in the background, then the solution should be to implement an additional push service.
A push service subscribes to your MQTT broker and sends push notifications to your mobile devices, so that either they have the MQTT client App running or not they will get the events.
Yes!
There is a chance that apple can reject your application when you are using VOIP(even though your app is not a VOIP Kind of application) to keep application alive!
I'm using Location services which is a proper solution to keep application alive in background mode.
Ask permissions to use location services even when the app in background mode & after getting the allow call back,set your location manager's desired accuracy to worst,distance filter to 99999(means your app will be notified if the user travels more than 99999 Meters from last location update call back)
By altering the desired Accuracy and distance filters you can save the user's battery consumption,otherwise your app will consumes lot of energy
That was one proper way which makes your application to run in background for more than 2 days continuously (Already using in our projects).
HTH! Have fun in coding :)
I would like to create a very simple app. When 2 peoples (who got the app) are geographically very close (20-30-40 meters), the 2 automatically receive a push notification with some infos about the other person. First, is it technically possible ? What would the most efficient way to make it ? Ibeacons ? Bluetooth ?
You can probably do something like what you are describing, however you can't solve it with iBeacon alone, that would just be a single component in the system.
The main parts of the system would be
Mobile app
Physical iBeacons (to let you know when you are close by)
Backend web service (to coordinate between the app)
When a user with your App comes within range of an iBeacon you could have it call up to the web service and provide the iBeacon identifiers. Then you could use that information on the back end to see if another device was also recently with in range. If so, push out a notification.
Just be conservative on your expectations. This would require a number of moving parts, and you should become familiar with the limitations of how iOS background notifications and how iBeacons work.
I'm trying to use an iOS BLE device as BLE peripheral which also advertises in background.
I already figured out how to advertise in background and got it detected by another device looking for the specific bluetooth UUDID.
Unfortunately the advertiser-info is not transmitted when the app is in background. Is there a way to send a short string or something else device specific when the app is in background? It would be ok if the app would be woken up for a short period (if this is possible).
The advertised services are removed from the advertisement packages when the app is backgrounded. Only foreground scanning iOS devices will be able to obtain the services.
The advertised services are arbitrary UUIDs. You can easily figure out some encoding to store characters in them. However, this has several caveats, like
the general scheme is usually that the scanner finds your peripheral by the service UUIDS. If the data can be anything, then this is tricky.
the peripheral will not be able to change the advertisement data while backgrounded.
I suggest you not try to trick around with the system. Rather plan for connecting to the peripheral for a short time and sending the data to the central during this interval.
how is it possible to send data to an iPhone which acts as an iBeacon?
I am looking for an process as the following:
Search nearby iBeacons
Connect to some iBeacon
Exchange data between the devices
Does anybody know how to put the different bluetooth functions together to make
this possible?
thx in advance
Standard iBeacons are transmit-only devices that can be seen by mobile devices, but don't actually "connect" to them or exchange data.
But you can still do what you are asking if you have an app on all devices as well as a web service to do the data transfer. This would allow devices A and B to detect each other when they are nearby and exchange data. Here's how:
Your app on devices A and B alternates between acting as an iBeacon (advertising its presence with an application-specific identifier and a phone-specific identifier) and ranging for iBeacon signals including the application-specific identifier.
During its ranging cycle, your app on device A will detect an iBeacon transmission from device B, which includes both your application identifier and the device identifier of B.
App A then makes a "write" call to the web service with a source of "A" and a destination of "B", along with any data you want to transfer, like "Device A says hello to device B."
The app would also periodically make a "read" call to the web service. In this example, device B would read any information destined for B, and the web service would return a record that device A had send it a message with the data "Device A says hello to device B."
Because the same process is also running on both phones, this communication can happen both ways.
iBeacon is a proximity technology and isn't designed for data interchange. However, since the Bluetooth stack is going to be active on your iPhone acting as the beacon (so it can advertise its proximity UUID), you can use Core Bluetooth to connect to the beacon and exchange data between the devices.
Does it specifically need to use iBeacon technology? The reason I ask is that from reading your description of the process, you could achieve the same thing using iOS 7's Multipeer Connectivity. It's able to abstract out all the technical complexities of connecting 2 iOS devices together regardless of the interface, be it WiFi or Bluetooth. I've managed to build something similar using MCNearbyServiceBrowser, MCNearbyServiceAdvertiser, and MCSession classes.