Ray;
The word “should” is used throughout the “Bluetooth Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Products, Release R6” document, and the word “must” appears in only in one place – on page 21, where it is stated “To incorporate iAP into an accessory design, the accessory developer must be a member of the Apple MFi licensing program”.
In other license-related documents, Apple is very specific regarding the legal difference between the usage of “should” vs. “must”.
I don’t work for Apple, but I’m pretty sure they only want your hardware so they can examine the functionality of your app when it is used with the accessory.
Regards,
Mark Davis
From: bluetooth-dev-bounces+markd=email@hidden [mailto:bluetooth-dev-bounces+markd=email@hidden] On Behalf Of Raj Sark
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:12 AM
To: email@hidden
Subject: Bluetooth Low Energy Accessory for Apple: Guidelines Mandatory?
Hi,
We are developing an accessory device for the iPhone based on Bluetooth Low Energy. We submitted the binary of our App on iTunes Connect. Apple asked us to send a copy of our hardware to California. We are about to send it soon and would like a small confirmation. We went through all the details within the document 'Bluetooth Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Products'. The question is: Are the specifications mentioned within the document mandatory to follow or meant as 'guidelines only'?
For instance, we have not included Flags, TX Power Level, Local Name, Services, etc. in each of our Advertising Data packets. Our advertisement packets contain only a two byte manufacturer's specific data. We have designed custom services to use only what is needed for our application. Our accessory is intended to work with the provided app, a specific App running on a iPhone 4S/5 device via a Bluetooth 4.0 link.
Could you advice if it is fine to design it in this way, or do we need to follow each of the 'Bluetooth Accessory Design Guidelines for Apple Products' as documented? Example: do we still need to use the Bluetooth services not needed for our application but mentioned in the design guidelines. The document does not mention if it is mandatory to follow these listed specifications.