Android BLE libs, no release version available question

[mobilekosmos]

I'm kind of confused about the BLE library situation for Android. Such an important technology, and there is not a solid production version from anybody out there, as far as I know. I felt like I was pushed to use Google's alpha lib to start a new project, but that lib was not touched in 2 years, so it seems deprecated to me. You seem to have the best alternative offer out there but also state "is not recommended for production use," so I'm stuck not knowing what to decide in a pro environment for important products, I mean, I must defend and be responsible for my selections against the customers. Are you committed to bringing your library to a release state and supporting it for a few years? Are you by any chance aware of the Google situation and can comprehend this?

Thanks!

[philips77]

Hi,
i would still recommend this library (version 2). The Readme states "is not recommended for production use" because the API is in alpha and may change a little in the future. However, this is the most you can get to "with active support", as I intend to add more and more features here. We started using it in our new libraries and apps and would also appreciate any feedback.

One topic which I think of is how to allow easy integration for different GATT services. In the previous Android BLE Library there was a BLE manager, which was designed to work as a middle layer between the BLE calls and the app, exposing only high-level API. I'm missing this functionality here, as the new BLEK is very low level (like internal impl in BleManager).
In 2 projects we found out, that it would be good to have the same connection (Peripheral), but with mutliple service implementations. For example, we connect to a Heart Rate device, where one part of the app is using the HRM Service, and another DFU or Memfault.

Something like:

peripheral.install(hrmServiceHandler)

You may also try https://github.com/JuulLabs/kable. The difference between this and Kable is that we plan to support mock peripherals, where a behavior can be implemented in code and the app would act as if it was connected to a real device. But that's not ready yet.