I'm new to BLE and thus BLE on Android and I'm trying to understand how BLE addresses are managed by Android. Looking at different posts and android documentation, I understood that Android is enforcing LE privacy by using private resolvable addresses when advertising and scanning.
I have a use case with challenging timing constraints and ideally I'd like to perform a direct BLE connection between 2 Android devices by using their MAC addresses instead of doing the usual scanning/advertising discovery.
Unfortunately, Android is now blocking access to the current device address using BluetoothAdapter.getAddress() for privacy reasons which prevents any out-of-band flow to share BLE addresses.
I was wondering if there is any way for an Android central device to use the Bluetooth public address (the one displayed in the device settings i.e. Settings/ About Phone / Bluetooth address) of an Android device set in peripheral mode?
I tried to use the following flow without success so my guess is that it's not possible:
On Peripheral device:
- Find the BT public address in the device settings
- Start a GATT server
- Start advertising with a specific UUID. This will use a new BLE private address but will not be used by the central device. This is mainly to set the device in peripheral/advertising mode.
On Central device:
- Direct connection with the peripheral public address:
BluetoothDevice bleDevice = mbtAdapter.getRemoteDevice(peripheralStaticPublicAddress);
connectGATT(bleDevice, context);
Thanks for your help!
EDIT 1: I tried to use the system permission android.permission.LOCAL_MAC_ADDRESS since my device is rooted. I can get the peripheral's own public address using the BluetoothAdapter.getAddress() method but opening a GATT connection to this address on the central device does not seem to work (with or without advertising on the peripheral device).
