Multipeer connectivity for android

android ios bluetooth compatibility multipeer-connectivity
lei.cc picture lei.cc · Mar 31, 2014 · Viewed 9.2k times · Source

So I'm trying to build an app that uses iOS 7 Multipeer Connectivity framework on the iPhone, but I'm now trying to connect the iPhone to an Android device using the same technology. Is this possible?

Is there something like Apple's multipeer connectivity framework for Android, or is there any way of connecting an iPhone to an Android device without using internet or mobile services, but using Wifi and bluetooth only?

Answer

p2pkit picture p2pkit · Apr 8, 2016

Maybe a bit delayed, but technologies have evolved since so there is certainly new info around.

As iOS has yet to open up an API for WiFi Direct and Multipeer Connectivity is iOS only, I believe the best way to approach this is to use BLE, which is supported by both platforms (some better than others).

On iOS a device can act both as a BLE Central and BLE Peripheral at the same time, on Android the situation is more complex as not all devices support the BLE Peripheral state. Also the Android BLE stack is very unstable (to date).

If your use case is feature driven, I would suggest to look at Frameworks and Libraries that can do cross platform p2p for you, without you needing to build it up from scratch.

For example: p2pkit.io or google nearby

Disclaimer: I work for Uepaa, developing p2pkit.io for Android and iOS.

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