Building Cross-Platform Offline-First Apps with Bluetooth Low Energy

submited by

Style Pass

2024-05-16 23:30:03

This is the transcript and slides from a presentation I gave at /dev/world in Melbourne on May 9, 2024, under the somewhat less descriptive title “Bluetooth Low Energy On All The Things”. If you like to watch things in video format then AUC has the original on their YouTube channel.

Hello everybody. Yes, my name is Tom and today we’re going to look at Bluetooth Low Energy and how you can use it for peer-to-peer communication in your apps. Now, Apple has an API for Bluetooth Low Energy and that’s called Core Bluetooth but for this presentation I’ll be using the acronym “BLE”.

This talk will be in four main parts. First we’ll talk about the concept of offline-first apps, why they’re cool, and why BLE could be a really compelling technology choice for you. After that I’ll briefly introduce the main concepts of BLE, things like advertisements and how connections work.

Then with that basic understanding in place I’m going to do a deep dive into six specific areas where things get kind of tricky, things which you won’t discover reading Apple’s documentation. For each one I’ll explain what the issues are and give you some advice about what to do.