I've read that as of iPhone OS 3.1, GameKit supports wifi connections. But the documentation states:
"If your application configures the
peer picker to allow Internet
connections, your application must
also dismiss the peer picker and
present its own interface to configure
an internet connection."
Does this still stand? If so, how do I establish a wifi Bonjour session that can be used by GK? (I'm only interested in using the local network.)
Your GKSession object will automatically handle the discovery of peers over WiFi or Bluetooth, and find those that are available on either protocol.
The documentation is stating that unlike Bluetooth, for which GKPeerPickerController provides a UI to enable Bluetooth if it's not already enabled, GKPeerPickerController does not provide a UI to enable wifi, or select the network the user wishes to be on, you will have to provide your own.
You can use GKPeerPicker class..There is connectionTypesMask,it has property
GKPeerPickerConnectionTypeNearby (for bluetooth connection or wireless). For more detail see my original answer..
gamekit over the internet
Related
I'm trying to figure out how to search for other devices logged into a wifi network that are hosting the application on a specific port.
How can I detect the presence of these other devices without knowing their address or even necessarily the port they are hosting on?
Once discovered, I should be able to contact the device and establish a connection with it.
The most standard "iOS way" would be to use Bonjour to announce and listen for announcements for the application.
EDIT:
As of iOS7 GKSession is deprecated..
Why don't you use a GameKit Session
Apple GKSession Docs:
A GKSession object provides the ability to discover and connect to nearby iOS devices using Bluetooth or Wi-fi.
Just because it's called GameKit, doesn't mean it can only be used in games :)
Can anyone explain how bonjour works over bluetooth from iphone OS 3.0 onwards?
The documentation says the Bonjour API's used in the application just works even if Wi-fi is off and Bluetooth is on. It also says , a Bluetooth PAN is established and hence IP address comes into picture.
But Bonjour (based on mdns) requires multicast to work. But , Bluetooth PAN (piconet) works on a master-Slave concept. Any data to be exchanged between peers has to go to the master first and then the master forwards to the all clients. Moreover there is a restriction on the number of slaves in piconet i.e., 8. that means bonjour over bluetooth has a limitation that it would work for a max of 8 devices?
Apparently, it's PANU to PANU communication. So the limitation is actually - one-on-one communication. If you use Bluetooth Explorer, included with Xcode, you'll see the iOS device presents a service with ID 0x1115. Since there is no GN nor NAP nodes in the connection, only two devices can participate in the connection.
Bluetooth Explorer also shows various custom fields that serve to exchange metadata about the connection. See my somewhat related question for an example of the service announcement.
I have only been able to get this service to appear when using GameKit, on both iPhone 3G with 4.2.1 and iPad with 5.0.1.
I know nothing about Boujour and iPhone... Perhaps Bonjour just sees the TCP/IP network and multicasts on to it -- regardless of whether the IP network is over bluetooth or WiFi or FooBar...
IIRC PAN just forms a point-to-point link to the PAN peer and, thus if the peer is an access-point (rather than just another end-node) it it it that will handle multicasting the packets.
I have a requirement to promote 3G/GPRS over WiFi connectivity in the iPhone application I am developing. Please let me know if this is possible and if yes, how?
The problem is when I have a WiFi network which is available and connected but not logged in using Captive Portal, I cannot use that WiFi network to perform the tasks which require internet connection. What i have noticed is Reachability API detects the available WiFi but I cannot use it as I am not logged in and so I am not connected to internet using this WiFi hotspot until I login. So I want to use 3G/GPRS to perform the tasks requiring internet connectivity.
iPhone's default behavior is it uses WiFi when its available and if not then only 3G/GPRS.
So please let me know if both 3G/GPRS and WiFi are available but I am connected to internet not using WiFi but 3G/GPRS how to use 3G/GRPS to perform the tasks requiring internet connectivity.
Regards,
Third-party applications don't get control of where their data comes from. About all you're going to be able to do is ask your users to turn wifi off while your application does its thing. If you need to get back onto wifi after doing the initial data transfer, you could make some clever use of the iOS 4 multitasking and local-notification APIs: when your application enters the background, it could start a background-task handler (using -beginBackgroundTaskWithExpirationHandler: in your app delegate's -applicationDidEnterBackground:) to wait for the wifi connection to become unavailable, do its thing with the cell network, then create a UILocalNotification to tell the user it's okay to turn wifi back on again. That way, the user could get the benefits of whatever your app does and still keep the connection they started out on.
If you are creating an app which needs to access certain network resource(s) to function, then you should just ping, or try to connect to those resources directly instead of just depending on reachability for the decision. If you can't ping your server, then have the app do the same thing it would if reachability reported zero connectivity (even though it may not be).
For security reasons, Apple doesn't allow developer to do such settings pro grammatically, despite you GPRS network connection to achieve some purposes.
I want to know if there is a way of changing the internet connection mode from GPRS to WiFi and vice-versa programmatically. I am developing one application and want to give liberty to users which internet connection mode they want to use for my application. Also is there any other connection mode available apart from WiFi and GPRS?
Not with a public API.
There's also Bluetooth connectivity, which is used for GameKit and also automatically used for device-to-device Bonjour.
I need to make a network connection over WWAN (i.e. the mobile network) on an iPhone, even when the device is connected to a Wi-Fi network, however I can't find a way to do this.
I've tried going down to the socket level and iterating through the available interfaces, however when connected to Wi-Fi, the WWAN interface (pdp_ip0) disappears.
The solution needs to be App Store safe.
Enumerate the network interfaces, you will see that when you're connected on both wifi and 3g, there are 2 with different local ip addresses. You might be able to use one vs the other by forcing a bind of your socket on the right interface before sending the data. The kernel which tries to find the best interface to route your packet should be happy with your choice.
Disclaimer: I have not tried this, this is just a suggestion.
Perhaps you can use the Reachability code to determine if Wi-Fi is enabled, firing a UIAlertView to warn the users to quit the app, open the Settings app and switch off wireless manually. Not ideal, definitely.
There is no supported way to to do this. You need to tell the user to turn off the WiFi connection since "It's a non-negotiable operational requirement for the service the app needs to connect to."
In this scenario, the user is not likely to kill you with bad reviews if you are clear about why they have to disable WiFi.
-t