Get advertisement data for BLE in iOS

Question

I'm creating an app that gets the UUID of all BLE devices within range. I've gotten it working fine in Android, where it gives me the advertisement data as a byte array. Now I'm trying to do the same in iOS.

I'm running a scan and it's detecting the device, and in the callback there's an NSDictionary called advertisementData. But the only information in it is as follows:

kCBAdvDataChannel = 39;
kCBAdvDataIsConnectable = 1;
kCBAdvDataLocalName = jaalee;
kCBAdvDataTxPowerLevel = 0;

Am I right in thinking I should be getting the entirety of the advertising packet? If not, how can I get it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, iOS does not allow you to access the raw advertisement data. I wrote a blog post demonstrating this. While the post is specifically about iBeacons, it applies to any BLE advertisement.

EDIT: To clarify, you can read the raw manufacturer data bytes or service data bytes of non-iBeacon advertisements. It is only the iBeacon advertisements that have their manufacturer data bytes hidden by CoreLocation. See here: Obtaining Bluetooth LE scan response data with iOS

The equivalent MacOS CoreLocation methods do allow this, so it is probably an intentional security or power saving restriction on iOS.