CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosiphonebluetooth
Lothre1
Lothre1

Reputation: 3853

Why is Iphone constantly transmitting a single beacon when it's bluetooth is enabled and it's screen is unlocked?

I've a iOS 10 device in my work place and I got curious about it's bluetooth's weird behaviour. So.. I was playing around with my Android's Beacon simulator App and I noticed that every time I unlocked my IPhone and enabled the Bluetooth a new entry was immediately created in my android's near by beacon's list. Is there a reason for that?

UPDATE 1 - handoff disabled - AirDrop disabled - No open apps. = still got a mysterious broadcast on my Beacon Simulator App.

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UPDATE 2 Ok, I was digging into the subject and noticed that the iOS device is not being able to find near by devices in a standard bluetooth discovery. In the other hand, near-by devices can detected the iPhone and when clicking on his entry in their result's list a popup for pairing shows up on Iphone's screen and as if it was magic the name of the device trying to pair shows up on the iphone's list that is always empty, in this case Huawei P9 but tested with a note 4.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 740

Answers (1)

Vincent Hiribarren
Vincent Hiribarren

Reputation: 5294

I am the developer of Beacon Simulator. I just want to warn that the app is a Beacon simulator before all, not really a Beacon scanner. I added the scanning part because it was easier to do some tests, for the beacon copy feature and also for future developments.

What the scanner will show you is not necessarily a beacon, but any scannable Bluetooth Low Energy devices, connectable or not. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know if a device is connectable or not with the Android API, so the app lists everything.

Since the icon represents a standard Bluetooth logo, it means it is a signal not recognized by the app (here, it isn't an iBeacon nor AltBeacon nor Eddystone beacon). So either it is a non standard beacon, or simply a signal to advertise a possible connection to the device. When a connectable device broadcast its presence, the signal uses the same channel and protocol than the one used by beacons. A connectable device will advert itself as connectable, but as said, the Android API erase this difference, unfortunately.

So what you see is not necessarily a beacon, but maybe simply your iPhone broadcasting its presence as a connectable device. Maybe I should add some disclaimers in the app.

Upvotes: 4

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