Android <-> iOS direct communication (Bluetooth). Is it possible?

Question

First of all I am an Android developer, so the question goes to all the iOS developers.

Is it possible to achieve an Android <-> iPhone/iPad direct communication?
Some claim it is not possible, others claim it is.

I guess two possible technologies would be Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct is not recommended because it is not supported by Gingerbread and as far as I know, it is not supported by iPhone either (maybe iPhone 6, as I have heard from rumors)

It is already known that Bluetooth communication is achieved between iOS devices using GameKit and here is a reference.

I don't understand what is so special when communicating with GameKit??
Are the messages wrapped in some way with extra bytes at the beginning and ending of the message? Fine, we can wrap the messages the same way in Android!
Are the messages encrypted?!! And if so, could we decrypt them when they are received in an Android device?

Any ideas, workarounds, or other hackerish solutions are mostly welcome!

Solution 1

There are three frameworks available in iOS using which you can develop the bluetooth applications:

1. GameKit: This is the publicly available framework . But using this you can only establish and communicate between only two iOS device. So this framework having its own limitations .

2. BluetoothManager: This is private framework .I used this framework to discover the non iOS devices . I have established the connection also . But cant able to do the data exchange. I think it is still under development. For the reference you can refer this link

3. CoreBluetooth: This is also the public framework. This can only discover BLE enabled devices . I have successfully used this to transfer the data between the BLE enabled devices.

Solution 2

iOS does not implement any standard Bluetooth protocols that would allow it to communicate with other OS'es. GameKit is proprietary and if it were easy to hack it then people would have already done so (and Apple would have closed the hole).

Bluetooth LE is only supported by few Android devices (it is not in AOSP yet) so it is not really useful yet, even if it did support peer-to-peer.

I've read that it is possible to do what you are after via Wi-Fi direct, e.g. with this library: https://www.alljoyn.org/ It says that it supports both Android & iOS - I haven't tried it myself, but it appears to do what you are after.

Solution 3

For devices on the same local network, Bonjour (a.k.a. zeroconf) can be a good way for processes on different machines/devices to discover and interact with each other.

See apple bonjour for android for some pointers to an Android implementation of Bonjour.