Wi-Fi Direct and iOS Support

ios iphone wifi-direct
Remixed123 picture Remixed123 · Feb 11, 2015 · Viewed 112.2k times · Source

I want to use Wi-Fi Direct in a solution, but I'm unsure which platforms support it.

Does Wi-Fi Direct depend on iPhone/iOS version?

Can I develop an application with Wi-Fi Direct feature on a iPhone 4s with iOS 8.

Answer

Remixed123 picture Remixed123 · Mar 5, 2015

It took me a while to find out what is going on, but here is the summary. I hope this save people a lot of time.

Apple are not playing nice with Wi-Fi Direct, not in the same way that Android is. The Multipeer Connectivity Framework that Apple provides combines both BLE and WiFi Direct together and will only work with Apple devices and not any device that is using Wi-Fi Direct.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/MultipeerConnectivity/Reference/MultipeerConnectivityFramework/index.html

It states the following in this documentation - "The Multipeer Connectivity framework provides support for discovering services provided by nearby iOS devices using infrastructure Wi-Fi networks, peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth personal area networks and subsequently communicating with those services by sending message-based data, streaming data, and resources (such as files)."

Additionally, Wi-Fi direct in this mode between i-Devices will need iPhone 5 and above.

There are apps that use a form of Wi-Fi Direct on the App Store, but these are using their own libraries.

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