Unique identifier for peripheral BLE device

Question

So I have peripheral BLE device and I need some identifier for it to later share with another iPhone. Example I connect with iPhone 'A' to peripheral. iPhone 'A' saves peripheral's identifier to database and later I easily can take iPhone 'B' and connect to the peripheral found by this identifier.

Now there is UUID what changes for every iPhone-peripheral connection, but MAC Address is not available. What could you suggest?

Answer 1

I have a similar problem and many thread like this say you cannot obtain MAC address by CoreBluetooth. I want to connect to a BLE peripheral (I mean open and connectable peripheral) and store some information on a database so that a different iPhone can read the same database and use the informations when it connects to the same kind of BLE peripheral. For now I rely on the device name, obtained like this:

-(void)addDiscoveredDevice:(CBPeripheral *)peripheral advertisementData:(NSDictionary *)advertisementData RSSI:(NSNumber *)RSSI
{
    NSString * name = [peripheral name];
}

because NSString * uuid = [[peripheral identifier] UUIDString]; gives me different results on different iOS devices.

Therefore, let's say my first problem is to know how many Apple Watch I have close to my iPhone, the second problem is to know if a given Apple Watch (eg John's Apple Watch) is close to my iPhone. Unfortunately this method doesn't work because users (eg John) or companies can change the name of their peripherals.

Yes I can rely on a combination of name + service uuid + characteristic uuid but for the same reasons, if the name changes it is useless. Does anybody found a solution?

Answer 2

If you do not manufacture the peripheral yourself then you can not uniquely identify peripherals across different iOS devices. This is exactly how Apple wants it to be since it means that developers can't track user's locations or movement patterns based on device addresses. It would be a privacy concern.

If you manufacture the peripheral yourself then you can do pretty much whatever you want. For example: Use a custom Service uuid, add uuid to manufacturer data in advertisement, set unique advertisement names, etc etc.. But if the core purpose of all this is to track your user then I would guess that Apple might deny your submission.