Question

I am Newbie to NFC Android App Development. I am done with the App development and everything worked fine. As part of my testing I used MifareClassic as well MifareDesfire tags to write and read. I am storing data in Ndef format. Initially I used the above testing tags with other apps like Nxp tagwriter and Tagstand Tagwriter and then I used with My app. So everything worked fine. Even later I used my app to write and read data from Sony Felica tags(new tags) which also worked fine. So I passed app to client for review but I came to know that app is not writing on New Tags. If they are reset from other apps then It works fine. So I done the same test here and found the same issue as client reported. What might be the issue? Has someone come across same kind of issue? Is it required to format before using? if so how to do that? Someone Help to solve the issue.

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

Some tags are not formatted by the manufacturer, but can be formatted for NDEF storage. Typical examples are MIFARE Classic, Ultralight and DESFire tags, while FeliCa Type 3 Tags will be formatted already by the manufacturer (and cannot be formatted by the user).

Android provides the class NdefFormatable for NDEF formatting. Whenever a tag does not support the Ndef class, but supports the NdefFormatable class, you can try to format the tag by calling the format() method. There is no guarantee this will work, though. In general, completely empty tags, right from the supplier, will give the best results.