User A is running your app on an Android or iOS device. User A can automatically find and communicate with other nearby (< 20 meters?) users B and C (Cross-Platform), whether they're running Android or iOS, and without any of the users having an internet connection (Offline).
I believe this is a commonly desired functionality, and having a definitive answer to this question would be a great boon to the mobile development community.
How to achieve the desired functionality?
Is it even possible?
Answer: YES. Apps like Firechat and Spaceteam do it, therefore it must be possible.
Multipeer: iOS only, doesn't achieve Cross-Platform.
Alljoyn: iOS bindings are Objective-C only, doesn't achieve Single Codebase.
Mono.Zeroconf: Supposedly would require separate platform implementations, so don't achieve Single Codebase?
Open Garden SDK: Would be a great solution, except it doesn't actually exist yet.
I've been researching this topic for several days now, and I haven't been able to find a definitive answer. Part of it is probably that people use so many different terms like mesh networking, ad-hoc networking, zeroconf, DNS-SD, etc., which makes it difficult to search.
If you're interested in some of the research I did on stackoverflow and elsewhere, here are some notes and links (I'm limited in the number of links I put directly in this post).
Not sure if this is what you are looking for but I would highly recommend Xamarin with the library ZeroConf which is native and has Xamarin support.
https://github.com/onovotny/Zeroconf
It works great and that gets you close to your unified codebase with a native and uniform way of discovering other ZeroConf devices.
Edit: It looks like the ZeroConf library only supports subscribing to ZeroConf services and not publishing also and I think you will need publishing as well. But it seems other users have requested it so it seems like a feature they will be adding.
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With