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I would like to build an IPhone app that should check the identity of a BT device, by name or MAC.

If the device is not part of the MFI programme what profiles should the device support in order for an IPhone app to connect to it and validate its MAC or name ?

Cheers, Ionut

user1477907
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I'm not sure you need to connect to something to get a MAC address or a name. My coworker's iphone seems to see all other bluetooth devices in our work area and displays the names, it just won't connect to them. And I'm sure it gets the MAC before it gets the name, but avoids displaying it to the user because names are a lot more friendly.

I do know that with android and blackberry, you actually use MAC addreses as your basic internal identifier, and only pull out the name when you want to identify your remote devices to the user.

If you really do need to make a connection from iOS to non MFi bluetooth radio, the advanced audio distribution profile (A2DP) would do what you want. There's a product out there I've seen that is a bluetooth controlled power board, and it used audio pulses being transmitted over A2DP to get around MFi requirements. Though you should reconsider this approach because it's problematic for a non audio device to advertise an audio profile. And this fake audio device will get seen by by a lot more than your application.

If you're happy to only work with iphone 4s and above, I've also heard rumours that bluetooth LE(4.0?) devices are not required to have the apple verification chip... but haven't really looked into it

Julian Higginson
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  • Hi lonut! Unfortunately I came to this thread via the bluetooth tag, not the iOS tag. So any iOS advice I can give is extremely limited. Only iOS coding I've done so far was playing with xcode on someone else's computer. Apple seems to have iOS SDK documentation online ( https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action ) and I expect you should be able to google for some example code somewhere too. If nothing comes of any of that, I can point you to where you'd get started with an android app... :-) – Julian Higginson Sep 05 '12 at 00:56