Bluetooth Smart (4.0) / GATT support in Android 4.0?

android bluetooth android-4.0-ice-cream-sandwich bluetooth-lowenergy
AlexeyVMP picture AlexeyVMP · Apr 6, 2012 · Viewed 19.3k times · Source

I'm trying to find way to work with Bluetooth 4.0 (AKA Bluetooth Smart) devices using modern Android smartphones, namely - HTC One V.

As I understood, there is some issues using GATT profile even in Android 4.0 with Bluetooth 4.0 hardware because of API limitations.

I saw Motorola released it's own API for BT LE, but not sure it will work for other vendors. My goal is to get universal support for all smartphones with appropriate hardware.

Any suggestion for solution are highly appreciated.

Alexey

PS: Yes, I saw Android API for HDP, but it seems to be used only with 'classic' Bluetooth devices (not low energy ones, as BT LE does).

Answer

introiboad picture introiboad · Apr 9, 2012

Unfortunately there are no Android native GATT APIs simply because Android currently does not support Bluetooth Low Energy at all. This may change in upcoming Android releases, but today manufacturers instead integrate 3rd party Bluetooth stacks with Low Energy support from vendors like Qualcomm, Broadcom or CSR. Those come with their own set of APIs, obviously limiting compatibility to the set of phones using that particular vendor's stack. The good news is that on other platforms like iOS or Windows 8 there are native GATT BLE APIs, and those are well supported. For Android, we will have to wait until Google decides to integrate the Linux/BlueZ work that has been done on BLE with Android.

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