CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bluetoothexpo
orome
orome

Reputation: 48566

What is the workflow for developing Expo apps that use Bluetooth?

I'm developing an iOS app that requires BLE but am confused as to the current state and workflow for getting Bluetooth into my app using Expo's tools.

So far I gather there are some constraints that I must work around:

So (and I'm new to this so be patient) I gather that means I must either

But what's unclear (and I may not even have the above quite right, in fact I'd be happy to know that it's not that complex) is how to access Bluetooth in the first place. I see that the Expo API provides access to all kinds of platform functionality, but don't see Bluetooth anywhere there. I gather that in order to use Bluetooth, I must use react-native-ble-plx (ignoring the part where it says my project needs to be "ejected"?) for which I need to add a corresponding plugin with

yarn add @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx expo-dev-client

and and the corresponding entry under expo.plugins in my app.json.

Do I have that right? Will those steps then give me access to platform Bluetooth (though not in Expo Go or Simulator)?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 11283

Answers (1)

mrexodia
mrexodia

Reputation: 705

See the Getting Started guide for details on how to set up EAS build with expo-dev-client. Here is a summary:

# Create the project
npx create-expo-app my-app
cd my-app
expo install expo-dev-client

# Install EAS
npm install -g eas-cli

# Configure EAS (follow the instructions)
eas build:configure

Then see the @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx for instructions to install the plugin:

expo install react-native-ble-plx @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx

Add the following entry to your app.json:

{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": ["@config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx"]
  }
}

You can build the development version of your app with the following command (this will include the react-native-ble-plx plugin you added earlier in the build):

eas build --profile development --platform ios

Finally you can start the dev client to work on your app:

npx expo start --dev-client

Upvotes: 10

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