CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iosaudiobluetoothplayback
DFENS
DFENS

Reputation: 319

ios receive audio over bluetooth

I'm most likely not using the correct terminology in my question.

Is it somehow possible for an iphone to receive an "audio stream" from other iPhones over Bluetooth?

The idea is to make an app that makes it possible to listen to the music libraries of other iPhones in the Bluetooth range. All while not having access to the internet and not needing to pair up and transfer the actual song onto the phone.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1673

Answers (1)

danypata
danypata

Reputation: 10175

The thing you ask of is doable, but is not something trivial. Bluetooth communication can be implemented to work like a TCP/IP socket implementation, the only problem is, there is no actual protocol to follow. Usually the apps that implement bluetooth communication use they own protocols definitions in order to serve the purpose of the app.

There are several steps that have to take in consideration:

  • The transfer speed over bluetooth, it's not fast but it's not slow either, the main problem with the transfer over bluetooth is that you have to implement the data transfer, for example in TCP/IP the whole package exchange (send/acknowledge/receive) is done by the system, there's no general protocol implementation to do such thing using bluetooth.

  • The connection handling, this is something really tricky depending on OS & OS version, especially on iOS the connect/disconnect handling is clumsy & often buggy.

  • Security, without pairing and bonding there's no security. Even with pairing & bonding the security is flacky. Without security you might get your app hammered down and bricked by a simple bluetooth sniffer.

  • Other apps that use bluetooth, for IoT or other gadgets this is not an actual problem, but when you have a client/server like approach via bluetooth using two mobile phone you might get in trouble because of other apps that wrongly use the bluetooth (don't close connections, try to scan to frequently) and you can't do anything about it.

These are the things that cross trough my mind about the bluetooth communication, I've worked on several apps that connect to IoT and I can tell you it's not something trivial to implement. You get a lot of headache for things that you can't imagine.

As an alternative you could use WI-FI without internet connection, there was a trending post some time ago about Mesh Networks that use only the WIFI signal to transmit data, not even actual wifi network, worth checking out IMO.

Upvotes: 1

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