I want people to be able to start my iOS app on their device, and anyone nearby running my app (probably bluetooth only for now) would automatically connect with each other. I've read about and used GKPeerPickerController, but I don't want the user to have to think about which device they want to connect with.
I'm just not understanding how to handle the connectivity without using GKPeerPickerController.
I am targeting iOS 5.0 with this app. Thanks!
This page goes into more detail on how this is possible, although the focus is more on using just bluetooth: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/40710-gamekit-api.html
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How to send data from an iPhone app to Windows app (or service) in real-time? Ideally over Bluetooth.
Basically as I type on my iPhone app, I want that text to appear on my Windows App (with-in a second or less).
How can I go about achieving this? I'd imagine there is some center-peripheral setup I need to establish. What are the libraries to use on both sides? Have never worked with Bluetooth in the past, so kinda lost. I looked into Apple's Multi peer Connectivity but that looks like iOS-Mac specific.
I have no idea on the Windows side, on iOS you would use Core Bluetooth to configure the app as either a peripheral or a central.
I have this problem where when I go out my iPhone 6s on iOS 9.3.4 tries to connect to every hotspot I pass. Then when it is trying to connect I can't get emails/texts/alerts etc. My solution has been to turn off WiFi. But then I get home again and forget to turn it back on and I wonder why my internet is so slow until I remember to turn WiFi back on. I got the idea for an app to build a geofence around my house and turn off WiFi when I leave that area. I know I can't do this automatically because of the iOS sandboxing restriction, but can I pop an alert when I cross the geofence boarder that asks if I want to turn WiFi on/off?
I haven't found anything current that allows me to do this. I have searched extensively and only found "Stumbler" but it appears to be from 2007. I only know C# and do all my app development in Xamarin so C# code would be best or if you know of any libraries/components/plugins.
Also, I just want this app for myself so no need to submit to app store.
Thanks,
I have created an iOS app that interacts with a bootloader on some custom hardware/firmware to update the application on the hardware. In order to accomplish this, the hardware/firmware has a bootloader application and a regular application. First, I connect my iOS app to the bootloader application and update the regular application. At which point the regular application starts to run and I would like to connect to it with my iOS app.
If I search for peripherals with an Android application it correctly sees my hardware broadcasting as the bootloader application and then switch to broadcasting as the regular application after the update has been completed. However, for some reason, the equivalent iOS app only sees it being broadcast as the bootloader application. I have found that if I restart the iOS device or if I turn the iOS device's bluetooth off and back on after a few seconds it will finally recognize that the regular application is broadcasting.
It seems as though the iOS device is caching the peripheral information. Does anyone know if there is a way to clear the cache or refresh to get the current/valid status of the device?
I have exactly the same issue here, unfortunately this is indeed due to iOS. There are a lot of other threads about this topic but after looking for a while I would recommend this answer :
https://stackoverflow.com/a/25930825
Best of luck, I haven't finished yet and this won't be easy...
We were exploring various test suites for mobile automated testing and ran into this company called Perfecto Mobile. One of the features that blew me away was they are able to (without jailbreaking) effectively perform a "Remote desktop" on a physical iPad.
So, the iPad's screen is mirrored within a web application, it can register touch / swipe events on the web app and perform them on the device. The only relevant technical detail I have is that all this is being performed using commands sent over the USB cable.
I'm really curious as to how this is implemented and details on relevant Private APIs if any.
Thanks,
Teja
I'm not familiar with PerfectoMobile, but I can give you a few pointers on how this can be accomplished:
For the mirroring, one way would be to look at using AirPlay, the APIs are pretty well documented, but not to do what we're talking about which would require some serious reverse engineering, but it's definitely possible, these guys have done it. A different approach would be to run a background app that would periodically take snapshots of the main screen, and send them over a socket connection to a client. You could do this as a VNC server, and to incorporate the remote view in a web app, you could use noVNC. As far using a USB connection, in the case of the background app talking to a client over TCP, you could to a port forward.
To actually perform on the device the touch events sent from your remote viewer, most people have been using the GSEvent group of functions from the GraphicsServices private framework without needing to jailbreak the device. Again, a background app would receive over a socket an instruction such as "Tap there", instantiate the GSEvent, and inject it so it gets processed in the run loop of the most front app.
These few possibilities, at least, have been implemented successfully in different iOS apps up to iOS 6.1 (iOS7 is a different animal). You won't find any such app in the App Store, since Apple clearly prohibits the use of private frameworks in 3rd party apps, instead people deploy them in-house using Enterprise and ad-hoc provisioning profile. On Android however, there's VMLite available in the Play Store.
If you looking to share screen from ios / android, check out skreen.me. They have sample apps you can try out, also they provide libs for mobile app integration.
I was wondering, if there is a way to use IPhone as an HID device, with some other device like PS3. I checked out the Bluetooth specification and IOS Devices do support HID Profile. So I thought it would be easy to pair my iPhone using passkey mechanism and should be able to start using my iPhone as keyboard or mouse without much hassle. But I found very soon that this assumption is naive and I need to develop custom solution.
I was initially thinking about using GameKit framework, but I think it only works between two compatible IOS Devices. If I want to extend this capability, then I have to use iPhone External Accessory API .In my analysis, I also found that iPhone will only communicate and pair with devices that are licensed by Apple. (Made for iPhone\iPod program). Does it mean that, if I want to use iPhone with another device, I need to get that device approved by Apple. ( Which will not surprise me one bit). Also if someone could point me to more detailed documentation on this, that will also be helpful.( What is an MFI developer board ??)
I do not want a solution that needs me to jailbreak an iPhone. (or any solution that will disqualify my app by Apple).
So to summarize:
1- Please validate my findings, correct them if they are wrong?
2a- How does External Accessory API Work?
b- Can I use this to connect to third party accessories ? (or is this only for accessory developers).
3- Or is there a better solution without using External Accessory API?
Please provide supportive documentation or link if you can. Thank You.
You are unlikely to get on the External accessory program from apple unless you are a big company ( you can try, but I have read this a number of places) . iPhones use a proprietary Bluetooth interface that and hardware must also implement this interface, so not much chance of getting it to connect to any other hardware directly.
Most apps like this (Remote Mouse) for example, connect to your wifi network, and have another application installed on your computer. The iphone can then talk to this application over the wi-fi network, but not bluetooth. I would suggest that the only way I can see this would be possible to to create the server app that you install on a computer on the wi-fi network that then in turn controls the 3rd party device if there is an API that you can use from the desktop app to control the 3rd party device.
This is just what I have found when I researched about this for making an app for iPhone to control a bluetooth watch. I had to jailbreak in the end to replace the bluetooth stack on the iPhone with one that could connect to any hardware device. Not limited by apple.