Background Bluetooth with iOS device

Question

I am working on developing a bluetooth peripheral to work with my iOS device. I need to make the iOS app receive data whilst it's in background and process that data as it comes. Looking through Apple's CoreBluetooth framework, I can see how the background execution modes can be used. Now to save power, I want the iOS device to only connect to the bluetooth peripheral at a certain time (without need of user interaction). I've looked through Local Notifications on iOS and it has very limited functionality and don't think it provides what I need.

So is there anyway to wake up an app at 6pm and ask the application to start scanning for bluetooth devices? And then execute other code once device is connected? All this without user interaction.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can't really schedule operations to occur at a specific time in iOS (aside from local notification, which as you said isn't what you need).

You can use background fetch mode to periodically allow your app to check for new data. You can set an interval (although this is only a guideline to iOS, not a strict schedule) for how often your app is woken.

When iOS calls your app delegate performFetchWithCompletionHandler method you can check the current time and decide whether you want to transfer data. If not then you can quickly return UIBackgroundFetchResultNoData. If you do get new data then you can retrieve it before returning UIBackgroundFetchResultNewData