Welcome to MobileBridge
Your home for Bluetooth Low Energy mobile library development
Our Services
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Delivered as frameworks for iOS and AAR libraries for Android, drag and drop our libraries into your app. Our libraries provide a consistent interface across platforms, and eliminate the need for you to deal with the complexities of the operating system Bluetooth libraries. Our detailed documentation gets any mobile developer up to speed and productive quickly without untold amounts of experimentation.
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We can support ReactNative, Xamarin, or Flutter. Our modular design provides several lightweight adapters between our performant native libraries and modern mobile rapid application development frameworks, reducing the amount of verification and validation work needed.
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Our libraries provide an easy to use interface, but we can also create interfaces that meet your needs. You do not have to modify your app to work with what we have, we write our code to work with what you need.
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Our libraries are tested against multiple versions of operating systems, and in the case of Android, multiple device vendors. If there is a particular OS version or mobile device you want us to test against that we do not have in our arsenal, we will add it. Validation packages are available for inclusion in your quality systems.
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Our libraries will scan for and maintain connectivity with devices while your application is in the background, so the mobile operating system does not suspend your application, enhancing the user experience.
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Our libraries provide your app with detailed status and troubleshooting events and details. Reduce your Bluetooth connectivity troubleshooting efforts from weeks to minutes
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If you are using a Bluetooth device still under active development, we can work with you to create simulators via an app on an Android device. We can also work with you to ensure that communication between our library and this new device over Bluetooth is simple and clear, reducing the chance of bugs.
Our experience building BLE devices means we can also write code for the device if needed. Our engineers have decades of combined experience and can help ensure that your device adheres to relevant standards and meets quality, technical and security requirements to satisfy many commercial and government contracts. Save yourself millions in redesign costs by designing your app and product right the first time.
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Do you want to keep us at arm’s length? Do you want to invite us into your communication tools, Slack or Teams, and have us use your CI/CD tools? Do you want us to join staff meetings to give updates? We will work how you need us to so that you get your product out on time and with no bugs.
Why shouldn’t I write my own BLE code?
You can. There are plenty of tutorials on the web showing you how to write code to scan for and connect to BLE devices, whether for iOS, Android, or using cross-platform libraries for ReactNative, Xamarin, and Flutter. From those tutorials, things look straightforward. By taking the template examples and swapping out a few things based on the devices you want to talk to, relatively quickly, you can discover and connect to the device you care about.
But you shouldn’t. As any developer (and especially the manager) knows, the 80/20 rule comes into play. It’s easy enough to do the basics, but turning that code into a product takes a lot more effort. When you scan sites such as StackOverflow and articles on sites like Medium, you can see the serious issues developers have run into. Talking to BLE devices is not the same as talking to the web, playing media, or interacting with data. Sending and receiving data to BLE devices is a lot more like writing low-level driver code, where you are manipulating data at a byte and sometimes bit level. Doing that on iOS and Android, where the communication interfaces are radically different, lets things get very complicated very quickly.
What are the challenges of writing your own BLE code?
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While the Bluetooth stacks in iOS (CoreBluetooth) and Android (BluetoothGatt) have become very good, Bluetooth is still an active area of mobile operating system development.
Every “dot 0” release of a mobile operating system brings new features. Many of these workaround problems they discovered with BLE in their previous operating system, which can break any workarounds you may have put in.
Additionally, battery life enhancements to these operating systems create new Bluetooth APIs and deprecate older ones.
Finally, as more BLE devices are put on the market, security and privacy become increasingly important, requiring new app permissions and additional security measures.
Maintaining your code through these transitions is costly.
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An issue unique to Android is that the mobile device’s low Bluetooth radio drivers to communicate with the Android Bluetooth stack has strange performance and functional bugs. These drivers differ between mobile vendors and sometimes even between different models of a single mobile vendor. This can lead to a costly scramble to put out a hotfix.
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Unlike USB in the PC/Mac space, Bluetooth is not really “plug and play”. Nearly everybody has used a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and headphones. However, very few have used some BLE wearables or health devices. Every BLE device type varies in compliance with published Bluetooth specifications, and there is no arbiter to keep a device from being shipped if spec violations are found. The pressure to standardize is low to non-existent.
You can get a window into this by looking at BLE blood pressure cuffs. You will find several blood pressure cuff devices that follow the Bluetooth data standard, but they don’t implement the same subset, and some don't implement it correctly. Some will implement the standard Bluetooth time service for tracking measurement time, but some will not and track the time of measurement in their own way. Additionally, vendors have built blood pressure devices that don’t follow the standard services at all.
Thus as a developer, you can’t pull a standard “blood pressure” library into your code from the operating system or a code snippet you find online - you have to write it yourself. This is true for most BLE device classes. The more complex the device, the less likely standards are followed. Devices such as exercise bands have no standards whatsoever - a true “wild west” for developers.
Let MobileBridge Be Your Bluetooth Low Energy Experts
You don’t need to become a Bluetooth expert. Let us handle Bluetooth for you, so you can focus on what matters most - your customers.
Contact Us
Contact us for more details on how to get started. We will set up a discussion to understand your product needs, and develop a solution that fits your needs and budget.
We look forward to hearing from you!