Both BLE & BluetoothLE plugins seem not to be loaded at all

cordova
1

Hi there!
I just arrived to Ionic framework because I’m using angular framework and I wanted to build a simple bluetooth application. My problem is that while I have used both BLE and BluetoothLE plugins, when trying to install my app I got no warning that the current app is using bluetooth and needs my permissions to use it.

The target Android version that I want to use is the 9 and thus I installed the 28 Android SDK and added the following lines to my config.xml

 <platform name="android">
        <preference name="android-minSdkVersion" value="27" />
        <preference name="android-targetSdkVersion" value="28" />
        ...

The I installed the BLE plugin using the commands that docs suggest and after running them I realized that there was no corresponding plugin entry to the config.xml (Is that expected). So I added on at the end like this

<plugin name="cordova-plugin-ble-central" spec="1.2.4" />

Then I imported at one of my modules the following line import { BLE } from '@ionic-native/ble/ngx'; and I added the BLE also to the providers list of the same module.

Finally I created a service of mine which is imported at a specific page and contains:

import { Injectable } from '@angular/core';
import { LogsService } from '@services/logs.service';
import { BLE } from '@ionic-native/ble/ngx';

@Injectable({
  providedIn: 'root'
})
export class BluetoothService {

  constructor(
    private logs: LogsService,
    private ble: BLE
  ) {
    this.initializeBluetooth();
  }

  initializeBluetooth() {
    this.logs.add('initializing BLE...');
     this.ble.scan([], 5)
     .subscribe(
       device => this.logs.add(JSON.stringify(device)),
       error => this.logs.add(JSON.stringify(error))
     );
  }
}

I tried the same with BluetoothLE plugin with some changes in the config.xml and the service files.

At the end I’m running ionic cordova build android --debug to produce an apk file that I’m using it to install it to my device (Samsung A20e)

At logs I can see the Initializing BLE… text but nothing else. Never asked for bluetooth permissions or to turn it on.

So am I missing something? Am I doing something that wrong? I tried many different combinations in order to figure out what is happening but no luck so far.

Any idea or suggestion would be appreciated.

2

If you’re new to Ionic, you may wish to at least look at Capacitor as an alternative to Cordova. In any event, I suspect you may need to wait for Platform.ready() to resolve before attempting to interact with the BLE plugin.