Getting list of available bluetooth devices in ios

Question

Is there a way to get list of mac addresses of available bluetooth devices in ios? I'm working on a programm which finds people nearby using bluetooth mac addresses.

Answer 1

I'm sure you have:

[centralManager scanForPeripheralsWithServices:nil
                                       options:nil];

That means your app is searching for BLE peripherals.

Every time your app discovers a peripheral invokes:

- (void)centralManager:(CBCentralManager *)central
didDiscoverPeripheral:(CBPeripheral *)peripheral
 advertisementData:(NSDictionary *)advertisementData
              RSSI:(NSNumber *)RSSI 

You can add each discovered peripheral to an NSArray of CBPeripheral

Answer 2

It is generally not possible, as iOS does not expose the Bluetooth address to the app.

If you are using non-iOS Bluetooth peripherals, you can manually include the BD_ADDR into the Manufacturer Info field of the advertising data. iOS exposes this manufacturer info, and you can get the BD_ADDR from there.

For many use cases, the UUID that iOS generates for each device is sufficient. If you could provide more details (possibly in a follow-up question), there may be a good chance that a solution can be found that does not need this workaround.