Would a Bluetooth LE Jedi know any trick how to get a reliable BLE scanning mode on cheap Android 4.4 devices ?
Everything works fine from Android 5 to 6, and most of the Android 4.4 phones... However, on some cheap phones with 4.4 we encounter random issues, some phones do not detect anything, or sometimes just a few beacons among others, depending on environment, daytime, weather, or whatever... It's obviously due to a poor software or hardware on this side, but is there any trick to make it more stable programmatically ? (for example enabling / disabling Bluetooth regularly)
EDIT
To describe a typical behavior:
First, note that it is the exact same behavior with all scanning Apps I could test (Estimote, Kontakt.io, AltBeacon, etc. etc.) - so this is much probably not a matter of App implementation.
It occurs only below Android 5 (4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.4.4) and on cheap devices, never on phones like a Samsung S5 for example.
The behavior: let's assume we have 5 beacons very close (less than 2 meters, all working fine). - Once rebooted the phone finds 5 beacons for 1 or 2 minutes. - Then it finds nothing for 5 minutes. - After a refresh it finds 2 beacons. - Another refresh of the scan: only 1 found. Then none... etc.
I could not find any logic, for now it looks erratic. Enabling / disabling Wifi / Bluetooth, Bluetooth+Wifi, Wifi then Bluetooth, etc. make sometimes the scan find one more beacon, sometimes not... there is probably not much difference if I just wait without changing those params.
The only way to get back a reliable scan is to reboot the device... then it works only for 1 or 2 minutes again...
It occurs on some very different devices (a Wiko Sunset, a Samsung XCover, an Orange Roya).
On more recent devices (Nexus 6, Samsung S5, Samsung A4...), 100% of the beacons are detected, for hours, and never lost.
So, as the complete reboot is actually the best solution to get all beacons detected I was wondering if there is a way to "refresh" the device's Bluetooth module without rebooting it... Or if we just have to become a philosopher about this ;-)
if you are develop your application using node.js then there are many api's avaliable which may work for you.But in case of android it is totally depend on your android version