Getting Started with Core Bluetooth

Table of Contents

• What is Core Bluetooth?
• Basic Concepts of Core Bluetooth
  • Centrals and Peripherals
  • Core Bluetooth Concepts Summary
• Putting it all together - App Tutorial
  • Scanning as a Central
  • Advertising as a Peripheral
  • Detecting a Peripheral from a Central
  • Connecting to a Peripheral
  • Discovering Characteristics inside a Peripheral's Service
  • Subscribing to a Characteristic
  • Confirming Notifications from the Peripheral was set
  • Sending data to the Peripheral
  • Sending data to the Central
  • Receiving Data from a Peripheral
  • Receiving Data from a Central
• Technical Reflections
  • Asymmetric Connections
  • Limited Message Sizes
  • Additional Speed Penalties With Reliable Delivery
  • Different Levels of Control Per Platform
  • Extremely Complex API
  • Demands Bullet-Proof Error Checking and Handling
  • Occasional Instability and General Odd Behaviour

Introduction

It’s really hard to overstate how much smartphones and tablets have transformed the world. Starting with the iPhone in 2007, these devices combine gorgeous and intuitive touch interfaces with a full suite of network technologies.

As an iOS developer, I wouldn’t consider myself a stranger to networking. It’s almost a bread-and-butter requirement that every app these days has some kind of REST API that handles the encoding and decoding of data to and from a remote source.

But that side of the technology aside, another huge side of networking on a smartphone that I’ve never personally explored before is Bluetooth. And yet, sitting here, writing this post wearing my wireless headphones, with an Apple Watch strapped to my wrist, after I just played some Animal Crossing on my Nintendo Switch with a wireless Pro Controller, I feel like Bluetooth is something I take for granted. It’s a black box of magic that I never worry about in my day-to-day life. It’s just there, and it just works™.

In all of my iOS engineering career, I’ve never been involved in a project, or had a need in any of my side projects, to learn the Bluetooth APIs Apple provides. So when my buddy Max asked me if I’d be interested in writing an app in order to demonstrate how Core Bluetooth works, and following up with a blog post on the experience, I jumped at the chance.

This blog post is geared for anyone else in the same boat as me. Someone who might not necessarily be a newbie to developing for Apple platforms, but has just never stopped to learn how the Core Bluetooth APIs work. I’ll discuss the core concepts behind Core Bluetooth’s parent/child architecture, show how to send some basic data between devices, and then discuss some of the pitfalls I encountered.

What is Core Bluetooth?

Core Bluetooth is an Apple public framework, and the only official way for third party apps to integrate Bluetooth functionality into their apps on iOS and iPadOS.

Up until this point, Core Bluetooth has been an abstraction over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which is different from “classic” Bluetooth in allowing far more energy efficient communication to support low-powered devices.

What this has historically meant is that Core Bluetooth was aimed at low powered peripheral devices such as heart rate sensors, or home automation; the kinds of devices that primarily reside in a low power state and periodically broadcast small tidbits of information.

By contrast, devices using classic Bluetooth (like game controllers and wireless headphones), which are much more high powered and constantly streaming data, were previously impossible to access from third party apps.

However, as of iOS 13, Apple expanded Core Bluetooth to cover classic Bluetooth devices as well. While the public API hasn’t changed through this, it does mean that a much wider variety of wireless devices now became available through it.

With all of these amazing capabilities, there has never been a better time to start learning how to adopt Core Bluetooth.

Basic Concepts of Core Bluetooth

When working with Core Bluetooth, it is necessary to become accustomed with the specific terminology of all of the major components of the service and how they relate to each other.

Centrals and Peripherals

BLE operates in a very traditional server/client sort of model. One device acts in the capacity of a server that contains information, and another acts as a client that queries for this information and processes/displays it locally.

Some devices broadcast advertisements about themselves. These are called "peripherals". Other devices scan for and connect to peripherals. These are called "centrals". After they are connected, usually the peripheral acts as the server and the central acts as the client. This is the way Core Bluetooth operates.

As a general example, when pairing a pair of Bluetooth headphones to a smartphone, the smartphone would be the central, and the headphones would be the peripheral.

Services

Obviously, the type of BLE device in question will determine what sort of capabilities it has. For example, a heart rate monitor can record a wearer’s heart rate, but a smart thermostat would record the current temperature of its location.

Most apps will be built to support one or more specific class of device capability. For example, apps for tracking a user's health would have no interest in connecting to devices that aren't health related, such as a thermostat. In order to encapsulate and report on the capabilities of specific peripherals, Bluetooth requires that peripherals identify their classes or capabilities as “services”.

Peripherals make themselves discoverable to centrals by broadcasting advertisement packets defining the main identifying service they offer. When a central scanning at the same time detects these packets and determines that the peripheral device it found supports the same class of service that it is searching for, it can begin the process of connecting. Traditionally, while only the main service of the device is advertised, once a connection is formed, the central can then query the peripheral for any additional services it offers.

In order for the central to determine it is compatible with a peripheral, it needs to know the ID values of the services that the peripheral supports. For very specific apps and peripheral devices, it makes sense to define a service using a shared UUID between both devices.

However, in more general practice, it makes sense for peripherals to adopt Bluetooth services that are a standard capability globally. For example, it would make sense that any device that records blood pressure readings could be connected to any Bluetooth device capable of processing that data, regardless of who manufactured either device. As such, a public database exists that lists a standardized set of service IDs that can be used between both centrals and peripherals who want to adopt a specific use case.

Characteristics

For any given service, any number of separate sets of information and/or services might be included within it. For example, a heart rate sensor peripheral might feature a heart rate service, but then contained within that service is both the raw current heart rate value along with information on where the sensor is positioned over the wearer at the time.

As such, services may contain any number of “characteristics” which record various types of data, or perform various sub-functions of the service itself. They may be used to receive data from the peripheral, or send commands back to the peripheral. It is possible for centrals to explicitly query for information from a characteristic, or register an observer that will be called every time the characteristic has an update.

This concept of Bluetooth devices offering their capabilities as services and characteristics is officially called GATT, which is short for Generic Attribute Profile.

Core Bluetooth Concepts Summary

Hopefully by this point, the basic layout of Core Bluetooth is starting to make sense to you. Parent devices are called centrals, and they connect to child devices known as peripherals. Peripherals manage their capabilities as services, who then manage their own capabilities via characteristics.

Putting it all into practice

Now that we've discussed the basic concepts of Core Bluetooth, we can start putting them into practice. For demonstrating the flow of connecting two devices, I've built a companion sample app around Core Bluetooth. The app is a very basic chat app that allows two devices to connect to each other, and to then send messages between each other. The app demonstrates how to both scan as a central and advertise a peripheral. Once connected, the app can then send messages both upstream and downstream through one pipeline.

Getting Started

For starters, before we do anything else, we need to add the NSBluetoothAlwaysUsageDescription key to our app's Info.plist describing why we want to use Bluetooth. If this key isn't present, not only would the app be rejected by the App Store on submission, but the app itself throws an exception when trying to call any Core Bluetooth APIs. This is a security requirement of Apple, as all apps must get explicit permission from the user before Bluetooth is enabled. For our case, let's explain we need Bluetooth to enable our chat service.

Access to Bluetooth allows you to chat with others from their own devices!

Once that's in place, we can start using Core Bluetooth. In Swift, every source file that integrates the framework must have the following import statement.

import CoreBluetooth

Scanning as a Central

For iOS devices that fill the role of the central in a Bluetooth connection, they are represented by an object called CBCentralManager .

To begin, let's create a new instance:

let centralManager = CBCentralManager(delegate: self, queue: nil)

As you can see, an object must be designated as a delegate upon instantiation. This object must conform to CBCentralManagerDelegate , and upon instantiation of this central manager, all of the necessary activity needed to start using Bluetooth is started immediately.

At this point, we can't start scanning yet. Bluetooth spends a non-trivial amount of time setting itself up to a state it could be considered "powered on". So immediately after this, we must wait for the first delegate callback.

func centralManagerDidUpdateState(_ central: CBCentralManager) {
    guard central.state == .poweredOn else { return }
    // Start scanning for peripherals
}

centralManagerDidUpdateState will be called every time the state of Bluetooth on this system changes. These include statuses such as when Bluetooth is resetting, or for if access is unauthorised for any reason. In a production-ready app, every single state should be properly handled, however in our case, we just need to only detect when the state of Bluetooth has reached "powered on". Once that has happened, we can then start scanning.

Scanning for peripherals is very easy. We just need to call scanForPeripherals and specify the services we are interested in.

let service = CBUUID(string: "9f37e282-60b6-42b1-a02f-7341da5e2eba") 
 centralManager.scanForPeripherals(withServices: [service], options: nil]         centralManager.scanForPeripherals(withServices: [service], options: nil]

As mentioned above, services carry unique identifiers so peripherals and centrals may match them. In Core Bluetooth, these identifications are handled via the CBUUID object, and for this specific case, we can use a simple string as the identifier. For this tutorial, I'm using a UUID string value generated from Online UUID Generator . The value needs to be globally unique, but recognizable from both peripheral and central sides.

At this point, the device will now be scanning for peripherals with the same matching service identifier. At any point, a central can be checked if it is scanning by calling centralManager.isScanning .

Advertising as a Peripheral

Now that our central is scanning, we need another device acting as a peripheral to advertise the same service we're scanning for.

Similar to how centrals are managed via a CBCentralManager , peripherals are managed by instances of CBPeripheralManager .

let peripheralManager = CBPeripheralManager(delegate: self, queue: nil)

Exactly the same as central managers, peripheral managers require a delegate upon creation (this time conforming to CBPeripheralManagerDelegate ) that also must wait for the state of Bluetooth on the device to reach "powered on".

func peripheralManagerDidUpdateState(_ peripheral: CBPeripheralManager) {
    guard peripheral.state == .poweredOn else { return }

  // Start advertising this device as a peripheral
}

Once the state of the Bluetooth peripheral is powered on, the peripheral can then start advertising itself.

let characteristicID = CBUUID(string: "890aa912-c414-440d-88a2-c7f66179589b")

// Create and configure our characteristic     
let characteristic = CBMutableCharacteristic(type: characteristicID, properties: [.write, .notify], value: nil, permissions: .writeable)

// Create our service, and add our characteristic to it
let serviceID = CBUUID(string: "9f37e282-60b6-42b1-a02f-7341da5e2eba")
let service = CBMutableService(type: serviceID, primary: true)
service.characteristics = [characteristic]

// Register this service to our peripheral manager
peripheralManager.add(service)

// Begin advertising, explicitly requesting it includes our registered service via its identifier
peripheralManager.startAdvertising(
            [CBAdvertisementDataServiceUUIDsKey: [service],
             CBAdvertisementDataLocalNameKey: "Device Information"])

There's a fair bit to unpack here, but if we step through it one part at time it's nothing too complicated.

CBAdvertisementDataLocalNameKey

Detecting a Peripheral from a Central

Now that one device is scanning and one is advertising both with the same service ID, they should be able to detect each other.

On the central side, when a peripheral is detected, the following delegate callback is called:

func centralManager(_ centralManager: CBCentralManager, didDiscover peripheral: CBPeripheral, advertisementData: [String: Any], rssi RSSI: NSNumber) {

    // Perform any checks on `advertisementData` to confirm this is the correct device

    // Attempt to connect to this device
  centralManager.connect(peripheral, options: nil)

  // Retain the peripheral
  self.peripheral = peripheral
}

didDiscoverPeripheral will provide a lot of interesting information about the peripheral. The advertisementData dictionary will contain information about it like the device's name and manufacturer name, in addition to all of the service UUIDs that were defined in CBAdvertisementDataServiceUUIDsKey (though there may be more we can discover later).

If necessary, it's possible to check if this peripheral supports the services this central wants by checking the value of advertisementData[CBAdvertisementDataServiceUUIDsKey] . In addition, the RSSI value ( Received Signal Strength Indicator ) is useful in determining the distance of the peripheral. Sometimes it may be necessary to require a specific proximity for proper functioning, and this value can be used to monitor for that.

If we are happy that this peripheral is the one we want to connect to, we can then call centralManager.connect() to begin connecting to it. At the same time, since there is no way to access these peripheral objects outside of the delegate, it is also a good idea to retain it to a local property in your class.

Connecting to a Peripheral

Once we've discovered a peripheral and called centralManager.connect() on it, the central will attempt to connect to it. When it does, the following delegate method will be called:

func centralManager(_ centralManager: CBCentralManager, didConnect peripheral: CBPeripheral) {
  // Stop scanning once we've connected
  centralManager.stopScan()

    // Configure a delegate for the peripheral
  peripheral.delegate = self

    let service = CBUUID(string: "9f37e282-60b6-42b1-a02f-7341da5e2eba") 
  // Scan for the chat characteristic we'll use to communicate
  peripheral.discoverServices([service])
}

At this point, we have now become responsible for that peripheral, and instead of acting through the central manager object, we now work directly with the peripheral object. This peripheral object is of the type CBPeripheral , which is distinctly different from CBPeripheralManager .

As such, the first thing we do is assign ourselves as the delegate for this peripheral, (Conforming to CBPeripheralDelegate ) so we can receive events directly from it. Once we've done that, we then call discoverServices on the peripheral, which will let us confirm the services it supports, and subsequently access the service characteristics we need.

Discovering Characteristics inside a Peripheral's Service

Once we've set ourselves to be the delegate of a peripheral and performed the request to discover its services, the following method from CBPeripheralDelegate will be called:

func peripheral(_ peripheral: CBPeripheral, didDiscoverServices error: Error?) {
    // If an error occurred, disconnect so we can try again from the start
     if let error = error {
    print("Unable to discover services: \(error.localizedDescription)")
         cleanUp()
         return
     }   

    // Specify the characteristic we want
    let characteristic = CBUUID("890aa912-c414-440d-88a2-c7f66179589b")

    // It's possible there may be more than one service, so loop through each one to discover the one that we want
    peripheral.services?.forEach { service in
        peripheral.discoverCharacteristics([characteristic], for: service)
    }
}

If an error occurs at this point, we must handle it and exit as gracefully as we can. Otherwise, our peripheral object has now been populated with all of the services that it supports.

Now, just like how services are identified via a CBUUID object, characteristics are identified in the same way. Before we can subscribe to a characteristic and start reading out the data it contains, we must also discover it as a member of a service. In addition, as peripherals can have multiple services, it becomes necessary to iterate through each one to discover which one has the characteristic we are interested in.

As such, we iterate through all of the services in peripheral.services and attempt to discover the characteristic we want via its ID.

Subscribing to a Characteristic

For a chat app, we're not interested in a passive stream of data from a peripheral; we want to be notified immediately when new data comes through. As such, we need to configure the peripheral to alert us whenever the characteristic is updated.

From above, once the characteristics of a service have been discovered, the following delegate callback will be called:

func peripheral(_ peripheral: CBPeripheral, didDiscoverCharacteristicsFor service: CBService, error: Error?) {
    // If an error occurred, disconnect so we can try again from the start
    if let error = error {
        print("Unable to discover characteristics: \(error.localizedDescription)")
    cleanUp()
        return
    }

    // Specify the characteristic we want
    let characteristicUUID = CBUUID("890aa912-c414-440d-88a2-c7f66179589b")

    // Perform a loop in case we received more than one characteristic
    service.characteristics?.forEach { characteristic in
        guard characteristic.uuid == characteristicUUID else { return }

        // Subscribe to this characteristic, so we can be notified when data comes from it
        peripheral.setNotifyValue(true, for: characteristic)

        // Hold onto a reference for this characteristic for sending data
        self.characteristic = characteristic
    }
}

Again, if anything failed during the above process, we first do any appropriate error handling before moving on.

Secondly, we've received a service object, but since a service can have any number of characteristics inside it, we must loop through it to discover the main one we want.

Once we've discovered the characteristic we want, we can then call peripheral.setNotifyValue() to true in order to start getting notified when the data in it changes.

Confirming Notifications from the Peripheral was set

One of the final steps in the process is that the peripheral will report whether setting the characteristic to notify the central was successful or not. Whether it succeeded or failed, the following delegate will be triggered:

func peripheral(_ peripheral: CBPeripheral,
                    didUpdateNotificationStateFor characteristic: CBCharacteristic,
                    error: Error?) {
    // Perform any error handling if one occurred. It's not necessary to abandon the connection from this kind of error
    if let error = error {
        print("Characteristic update notification failed: \(error.localizedDescription)")
        return
    }

    // Ensure this characteristic is the one we configured
    guard characteristic.uuid == characteristicUUID else { return }

    // Check if it is successfully set as notifying
  if characteristic.isNotifying {
        print("Characteristic notifications have begun.")
    } else {
        print("Characteristic notifications have stopped. Disconnecting.")
        centralManager.cancelPeripheralConnection(peripheral)
    }

    // Send any info to the peripheral from the central
}

While I don't think it is explicitly required to implement this method, if the subscription failed, it would make sense to detect this and attempt to subscribe again (or perform any cleanup code if needed) at this point.

Additionally, if the central has data pending that it would like to send to the peripheral, this would be best place to send it.

Sending data to the Peripheral

Once the central manager has successfully been able to capture both the peripheral and the relevant characteristic, the central can then start sending data to the peripheral via this characteristic. One thing to note is that the characteristic must have been explicitly configured on the peripheral's side to be writable by the central.

At any point after that, it's possible to send data to the peripheral by calling:

let data = messageString.data(using: .utf8)!
peripheral.writeValue(data, for: characteristic, type: .withResponse)

The type argument lets you specify whether you want the peripheral to reply that it received the data or not. This is great for discerning between types of data that might be explicitly required in a certain order and data that is often repeated, so if the peripheral didn't catch it, nothing of value was lost.

Sending data to the Central

On the opposite side, sending data to a central from the peripheral's side is a similar method:

let data = messageString.data(using: .utf8)!
peripheralManager.updateValue(data, for: characteristic, onSubscribedCentrals: [central])

Receiving Data from a Peripheral

Finally, after all that, we're ready to start receiving data from the peripheral. In order to be notified of when new data has arrived from a characteristic, you use the following delegate:

func peripheral(_ peripheral: CBPeripheral, didUpdateValueFor characteristic: CBCharacteristic, error: Error?) {
    // Perform any error handling if one occurred
    if let error = error {
        print("Characteristic value update failed: \(error.localizedDescription)")
        return
    }

    // Retrieve the data from the characteristic
    guard let data = characteristic.value else { return }

    // Decode/Parse the data here
    let message = String(decoding: data, as: UTF8.self)
}

Receiving Data from a Central

Last of all, when a peripheral receives data from a central, the following method of CBPeripheralManager will be called:

func peripheralManager(_ peripheral: CBPeripheralManager, didReceiveWrite requests: [CBATTRequest]) {
    guard let request = requests.first, let data = request.value else { return }

    let message = String(decoding: data, as: UTF8.self)
}

One thing of which to be extra aware of is that if the characteristic was not set as writeable at its time of creation, then sending data to the peripheral will silently fail and this delegate will never be called.

Summary

So after going through each step, it's obvious that sending data over Core Bluetooth involves quite a few steps. From the peripheral side, peripherals have to configure and advertise their services and characteristics, and manage when centrals subscribe and unsubscribe. From the central side, subscribing to a characteristic is a multi-step process of scanning for the peripheral, connecting to the peripheral, discovering the peripheral's services, discovering the service's characteristics, and finally, subscribing to them.

However, with all that being said, once you understand the terminology and how each object in the chain is related to the next, everything falls into place relatively easily.

Challenges with the Chat App

While the above introduction to the Core Bluetooth API shows in general the basic steps of connecting a central and a peripheral, when writing the chat app, a rather large hurdle appeared immediately: who is the central and who is the peripheral?

In a classic use case where a low powered sensor is connected to an iPhone, the role of central and peripheral is clear cut. However, in a connection between two iPhones, the question of who plays which role suddenly becomes a much harder decision.

One neat thing that might not be obvious from the start is that Core Bluetooth can make a device be a central and a peripheral at the same time, meaning it is simultaneously both scanning and advertising.

When a device has opened the app to the device discovery screen, it will create both a central manager and a peripheral manager, and will begin scanning and advertising at the same time.

Any devices in range will be doing the same thing. In this way, any other devices our device detects can be shown on-screen, and likewise, any other devices that detect our device will show our device on their screen.

While the device discovery screen is interested in detecting all available devices we could potentially chat with, once we go into a chat session window, we only want to receive messages from the remote device we selected.

In this case, when the user taps on the device they want to talk to, the hardware UUID of the selected device is saved, and the chat window is opened up holding a copy of the UUID. When both devices have opened to the same chat window, both devices will be set to scan like a standard central, and a connection won't occur yet. To avoid detecting devices advertising for the device discovery menu, a different service UUID is used for these connections.

Both devices performing scanning continues to happen until the first time either participant in the chat submits a message in the chat. When this happens, that particular device becomes a peripheral and starts advertising itself as such. When this happens, the other device detects the first device and connects to it as a central. In essence, whoever chats first becomes the peripheral, and whoever chats last remains the central, together sharing a single connection. During the advertisement, the saved hardware UUID is used to determine the identity of the connecting device, to guarantee someone else from a different session who happened to start broadcasting didn't accidentally join instead.

Overall, this method might seem a bit strange. On a more pragmatic level, it might make more sense to set up and maintain two connections, where each device is its own central connected to another peripheral. However, in practice, this can be more unreliable, as now there are two connections that could potentially fail if any interference occurs.

Technical Reflection

Now that we've discussed the Core Bluetooth API and its design pattern, it should be easy to understand how to work with it. That being said, what we've looked at here has been the bare minimum of getting Core Bluetooth moving and would absolutely not be sufficient for a production app .

The folks here at Ditto use Core Bluetooth in their flagship product, and by extension, Bluetooth Low Energy itself for Android support. In addition to some of the challenges and limitations I experienced in this project, here are some of the challenges the Ditto engineers have faced as well.

Limited Message Sizes

One thing I completely glossed over is that the amount of data that can be sent through a characteristic has a very hard limit, and that limit changes between devices. Historically, it's been 20 bytes, but on more modern phone hardware, it can be around 180 bytes. For a chat app where the payload is very small per message, it isn't so much of a concern, but it certainly is something that a production app needs to take seriously. Core Bluetooth is capable of detecting and reporting the acceptable length of each message, and if a device wants to send more than that, then it's the responsibility of your own code to chunk that data up and send it as multiple messages.

Speed Limitations

The maximum speed of communicating via GATT is only actually a few kilobytes per second. Again, in our chat app, this is a limitation that we would never bump up against, but in heavier applications, this could quickly become a bottleneck. Depending on your use case, you might have to optimize your message payloads to be more efficient.

Additional Speed Penalties With Reliable Delivery

When writing data to a characteristic specifying the .withResponse attribute (guaranteeing the peripheral will confirm it received the data), this roundhouse operation also incurs an additional speed penalty. For use cases that require the absolute top speed, it is usually best to rely on unreliable delivery instead and to implement your own error correction logic.

Different Levels of Control Per Platform

While Core Bluetooth instigates its own specific policies, these may not apply to the equivalent BLE implementations on other devices such as Android. A big example of this is the limitations Core Bluetooth imposes on how much and what sort of data can be included in the advertising packets of a peripheral. As such, when building a product that might have an equivalent Android counterpart, care must be taken to ensure the interfaces behave the same way.

Security/Privacy Policies with Backgrounded Apps

While the regular Bluetooth stack on iOS functions regardless of onscreen activity, Apple has implemented strict privacy policies on apps adopting BLE. When a peripheral device app is backgrounded, it will continue to advertise, but the "Local Name" property will no longer be included. Additionally, backgrounded centrals will no longer receive repeating advertisements from any peripherals in range.

This particular limitation has been a big point of contention for organizations who have been trying to build COVID-19 contact tracing apps on top of Core Bluetooth.

Extremely Complex API to Work With

While it certainly becomes easier to work with over time, Core Bluetooth certainly isn't an easy framework to get up and running quickly with. In order to start sending and receiving data, a very long process of steps need to be followed in order to slowly capture all of the objects you need.

Compounding this, the steps are done via callbacks one after another, one at a time, and sometimes even where one delegate daisy-chains a new delegate (as is the case with CBPeripheral ). Working out the process needed for your own use case can be very time-consuming and require a high cognitive load.

Demands Bullet-Proof Error Checking and Handling

At any point of the delegate callback process, errors could easily happen that derail the whole process. As a wireless technology, Bluetooth is prone to interference, or randomly losing devices. As such, all of the delegate code needs to have bullet-proof error handling at every step in order to handle issues that can potentially occur at any step of the process. This can also potentially mean proactive heartbeats or state checks in case an expected callback fails to occur.

Occasional Instability and General Odd Behavior

Even though Core Bluetooth is quite old at this point, there is still some occasional odd behavior that can happen quite reliably:

• Sometimes if the sending queue is filled to capacity, a callback to say it has cleared will sometimes be skipped. This requires periodically testing the queue to see its state.
• Certain specific devices (Like iPad Mini 4 and iPhone 6) can potentially accidentally stop scanning if they are locked and then unlocked.

Lack of Encryption

Given that some forms of data transmitted over Bluetooth could be quite private or personal (e.g., a person's health records), encryption is always strongly recommended. While a form of BLE encryption exists, it is not reliable. As such, in your own implementations, you might need to consider writing your own encryption layer and all of the (error correcting) implications that would entail.

Conclusion

When I first got the chat app working, and the text I typed on one phone automatically appeared on the other, it felt absolutely magical. I had a fantastic time learning Core Bluetooth in order to write this post, and I hope you found everything here useful!

But at the end of this, one thing is certainly clear. Implementing your own Core Bluetooth implementation is hard . It involves a lot of steps, and a lot can go wrong at any point in the user's experience. If you're an engineer researching Core Bluetooth because you're looking to build a new product that implements that sort of local communication, instead of rolling a new implementation from scratch, I'd recommend you consider checking out the synchronization technology from Ditto. Ditto's tech stack has already taken care of all of the challenges listed above, and would make integrating communications into your app a breeze.

Thanks for reading!

Sample App Github Repository