I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet

These lines by David Bowie summarize the feelings an iPhone developer has, when dealing with Apple’s APIs. In our case, we had to work with the bluetooth API of Apple which has its issues (connection losses, etc.). We had troubles of all kinds with the bluetooth API and we are now having one the most frustrating developer experiences: the unannounced and invisible bluetooth API change. We used a certain a callback (didFailWithError) to determine if the iPhone had bluetooth activated or not. This worked fine in 3.0 and helped to overcome the bluetooth API limitation of not being able to detect if bluetooth was on/off with your own code. Apple quietly changed this in the new version of the firmware and this is not working any more. On top of that, Apple didn’t provide a subsitute function to detect the bluetooth state in the new version of the firmware.
The result of this? If your App requires bluetooth and you do not tell the user to turn on bluetooth (which is quite difficult if you cannot detect the bluetooth state programmatically), your App won’t work and Apple can reject your App, arguing that the user may be confused.

Your ikangai team

Tags: API, bluetooth woes, iPhone