Which platforms have Bluetooth 4.0 peripheral / slave support?

Question

I developed a BLE device that acts as a master, and connects to sensors that are slaves. Now I want to develop an application that displays the data from my device (master) in real-time, so that application has to act as slave (advertizes).

• Windows 8 API: Unsupported
• Windows Phone: Unsupported
• Windows RT: Unsupported
• Android 4.4 API: Unsupported
• iPhone / Mac: Supported

So it seems its really impossible to develop any kind of app for this, besides on Linux maybe, or on Windows through a custom stack, but I would prefer to do this on a phone, and if possible not an iPhone.

Does anyone knows of any phone/tablet OS which supports this out of the box?

Answer 1

Working on the same type of cases and found that out of all platforms only iOS/Mac OS support both peripheral (slave) and central (master) roles.

For the peripheral role you will have to use CBPeripheralManager, and will have to setup your own service/characteristic. For the central you will have to use CBCentralManager, which will receive CBPeripheral objects through delegate notifications. Then you will have to query it for the services/characteristics/descriptors.

So I would say, today you are out of options for the peripheral role, only iOS/Mac OS.

Answer 2

Android 4.3 (API Level 18) introduces built-in platform support for Bluetooth Low Energy in the central role and provides APIs that apps can use to discover devices, query for services, and read/write characteristics.

In order to use Bluetooth features in your application, you must declare the Bluetooth permission

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH_ADMIN"/>

Answer 3

As far as I know phones, tablets, pc and that kind of devices with "no energy problems" are far more suitable to act as master. As consequence Master mode is the only supported mode

My advice: I do not know if possible but I would move the logic of your BLE device to the android/iphone/whatever app and remove your custom device.