Question

My application needs to connect to a a2dp device over bluetooth and I want to “be able to query for the visible bluetooth devices, then, select a a2dp device and have it ‘connect via a2dp’ so that audio starts playing through the connected device” but my phone is running gingerbread (2.3.3).

I went through the basic bluetooth tutorial at http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/wireless/bluetooth.html and got to the part I need to connect to the bluetooth device and then I read the bottom of the page:

“Starting in Android 3.0, the Bluetooth API includes support for working with Bluetooth profiles.” -> does this mean that I am S.O.L.? Is there any way to programmatically (why does stackoverflow mark programmatically as being misspelled?!) connect to a a2dp device using a pre-3.0 version of Android? Is my only option to direct the user to go into their settings/pull up the settings programmatically?? Because I’m able to do it through the settings, I guess I just assumed it would be possible via my application as well.

Help?

Answer 1

Some of the Bluetooth classes (profiles like BluetoothA2dp) are hidden in Gingerbread. It means that their declaration is annotated by @hide, and they are not included into the SDK (Android.jar). This is done intentionally, since these APIs are likely to be changed in newer Android versions. Generally it is not a good idea to use hidden APIs, since your App can stop working on newer Android versions, but if you are sure you want to, follow
http://devmaze.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/using-com-android-internal-part-1-introduction/

Once you get access to them do something like (just a hint):

BluetoothA2dp mBluetoothA2dp = new BluetoothA2dp(context);
BluetoothDevice device = BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter().
// Loop through paired devices
for (BluetoothDevice device : mBluetoothAdapter.getBondedDevices()) {
    if (device.getName().contains("whatyouwant")) {
        mBluetoothA2dp.addSink(device);
    }
}