Is it possible to identify devices around me that have their bluetouth enabled?
I don’t need to communicate with them, just know they are there.
I am looking for something similar to android’s BluetouthDevice.startDiscovery()
Is something like this possible?
One thing you might want to look into is Bonjour and NSNetServiceBrowser.
You can publish a service and also search for other services around you. There are ways to run Bonjour in the background (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6345554/bonjour-in-the-background).
The only limitation with this approach is that everyone else would also need to be running the app as well. Also, by default Bonjour discovers over both WiFi and Bluetooth, something else you would probably need to look into.