Peripherals

In this section, we will discuss several communication protocols that enable applications to communicate with other platforms and other devices.

Bluetooth

The Bluetooth communication protocol has become an invaluable feature on mobile devices. Especially with the emerging technologies related to IoT (Internet of Things), and various accessories we use in daily life, our dependency on the Bluetooth stack on mobile platforms has increased.

While Xamarin.Android applications and Windows Runtime applications can make use of both GATT (Bluetooth Low Energy) and RFCOMM (Bluetooth Serial), iOS applications can only communicate through the Bluetooth LE protocol. The main reason for this discrepancy is the fact that Android and Windows Runtime implement the serial communication port according to shared specifications. However, Apple implements a propriety communication stack using an encryption system. This, unfortunately, limits the serial communication to between only Apple produced/compliant...