What is the workflow for developing Expo apps that use Bluetooth?

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I'm developing an iOS app that requires BLE but am confused as to the current state and workflow for getting Bluetooth into my app using Expo's tools.

So far I gather there are some constraints that I must work around:

  • Simulator does not support Bluetooth
  • Expo Go does not support Bluetooth

So (and I'm new to this so be patient) I gather that means I must either

  • expo run:ios -d and run on a connected device, or
  • eas build -p ios and download to devices.

But what's unclear (and I may not even have the above quite right, in fact I'd be happy to know that it's not that complex) is how to access Bluetooth in the first place. I see that the Expo API provides access to all kinds of platform functionality, but don't see Bluetooth anywhere there. I gather that in order to use Bluetooth, I must use react-native-ble-plx (ignoring the part where it says my project needs to be "ejected"?) for which I need to add a corresponding plugin with

yarn add @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx expo-dev-client

and and the corresponding entry under expo.plugins in my app.json.

Do I have that right? Will those steps then give me access to platform Bluetooth (though not in Expo Go or Simulator)?

expo bluetooth
1 Answers

See the Getting Started guide for details on how to set up EAS build with expo-dev-client. Here is a summary:

# Create the project
npx create-expo-app my-app
cd my-app
expo install expo-dev-client

# Install EAS
npm install -g eas-cli

# Configure EAS (follow the instructions)
eas build:configure

Then see the @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx for instructions to install the plugin:

expo install react-native-ble-plx @config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx

Add the following entry to your app.json:

{
  "expo": {
    "plugins": ["@config-plugins/react-native-ble-plx"]
  }
}

You can build the development version of your app with the following command (this will include the react-native-ble-plx plugin you added earlier in the build):

eas build --profile development --platform ios

Finally you can start the dev client to work on your app:

expo start --dev-client
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