Few weeks ago I started designing a product that requires wireless connectivity, and more specifically Bluetooth audio. I need it to work "right out of the box" with the most popular mobile devices such as smartphones (iPhone, Android, etc) and computers, just like average Bluetooth speakers would (ie. appear in the found Bluetooth device list and directly connect to the device, ready to play its audio content).
However, there seem to be dozens of different Bluetooth profiles that all have their own specificities, but I couldn't find one that is compatible to every device class. For example, I'm aware that Apple requires the device to be a part of the MFi program, and I heard that the iAP Bluetooth profile was required to communicate with an Apple device, etc, but is this profile compatible with Android or windows Phone too ? If not, is it possible to run different profiles at the same time ?
Some Bluetooth modules (like the Microchip RN52) offer support for those profiles but can they be discovered and connected to devices that only support other profiles ?
Thanks for your answers.
Best Answer
Two profiles are involved for audio:
A2DP (for audio streaming) and AVRCP (for remote control). These profiles are available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Linux, Windows, and many other systems. You can use it on apple devices without any MFi license. MFi is only used for RFCOMM-dependent profiles, such as serial port profile, or iAP.
The downside of this is that devices usually implement AVRCP 1.0 or 1.3, that allow to perform play/pause/stop/next/previous, and, with 1.3, to get information about currently played song, but don't allow browsing of the content (implemented in AVRCP 1.4).