Finding and Android NSD-Service from a non-Android Device

Question

Since Android 4.1 Network service discovery (NSD) is available. However, how would one find an android device that exposes an NSD-Service from a computer or from some other device that does not run android. Building an android app as shown in the examples will find the other device just fine, however, one does not always have Android as a platform.

I am running UPnP discovery on my PC and the phone does not show up.

You can find my NSD-Service implemented here on github.

The Discovery app is simple from the android example.

The UPnP example is using Cling and is from their tutorial it finds my router and the windows media player so I assume it works.

It may be that the issue is based on a mismatch of service discovery protocols, I relay am confused as to the differences between NSD, UPnP, Bonjour, Zeroconf and all the other possibilities...

Answer 1

The protocol you are after is http://www.dns-sd.org/ - DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD)

That seems to be the only protocolType in the current Android framework.