We started from an Android app, due to the higher count of devices among people.

It also seemed to be a little more permissive in regard to accessing the hardware features we needed: sending an advertisement properly formatted, and scanning continuously.

Aiming to deploy a quick demo on both the smartphone families, we adopted the Cordova framework, extended with plugins to drive Bluetooth hardware.

To be honest, we now know we made a mistake and we should have written native code in order to save time.

The Cordova plugins we used are intended for connecting IoT devices and the support for advertising/scanning functionalities is less than what we desired. Whatsmore, there is a big asymmetry between iOS and Android support, exceeding their natural differences, so the portability won’t be achieved without a complete refactoring.

The plugins we used, are:

cordova-plugin-ble-central 1.2.4 "BLE"
cordova-plugin-ble-peripheral 1.0.0 "BLE Peripheral"
cordova-plugin-bluetoothle 4.5.9 "Bluetooth LE"

Our Cordova and BLE based experiments are available on Github. To run it on Android, you need to:

- install the Cordova framework (with Android’s ADB)
- create a Cordova empty app, and add the platform
- install the plugins already mentioned
($ cordova install pluginName)
- checkout the Github repo into /www directory

Please mind you will browse a test branch, in the repository of a project that never surfaced!

You need physical devices (smartphones) to be cable-connected to the IDE, either in Android or iOS, as Bluetooth hardware response cannot be virtualized in an emulator. Whatsmore, due to interacting through a terminal, you should contemplate “hexagonal” architectures of your code, those including interfaces dedicated to testing the single units of code.