Posts for Tag: core bluetooth

iOS - Bluetooth Low Energy in the Background

The Apple documentation is I believe correct although in places it isn't as explicit as I would prefer. This short article aims to explain what you can and cannot do in the background and the behaviour you will see. This information is relevant for iOS 7. [Update: If iOS 8 is different I will try to revise this post at a later date.  iOS 8 behaviour appears the same in my initial testing and I couldn't find any significant changes documented and there was no CoreBluetooth talk at WWDC 14.] If you think anything is inaccurate please let me know I don't want to mislead anyone and my testing hasn't been extensive.

Not Quite Enough for Peer to Peer Applications

My summary of the situation is that you can't do quite enough to support peer to peer in a viable way unless you have an app that you expect to be run on a regular basis anyway because the background modes (except for iBeacon detection) do not persist through a reboot of the phone or a flat battery. This means that the user will fall off your peer to peer application framework.

iBeacons can awake apps that have not been running since a reboot but iOS devices can only themselves perform as iBeacons in the foreground.