Wifi Direct

[megamattron]

Does anyone have experience with Wifi Direct? Would love to find out if we could do fast and automatic syncing to peers without pairing or other user interaction.

[countrygeek]

This is more inside the scope of Serval Project - https://github.com/servalproject
However, due to wifi chipsets of each device, connection is pretty erratic. Bluetooth is more stable for now.

[zawarudo]

I was hoping the Bluetooth 3.0 + HS specification could be used as an alternative however I don't think it has been implemented in android. HS sets up an initial Bluetooth connection and then does the transfer over WiFi providing theoretical data transfer speeds of up to 24 Mbit/s.

WiFi direct doesn't seem to allow automatic connections without user interaction. There was an issue opened up on bypassing user interaction but no response yet.

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=30880

[megamattron]

@countrygeek It seems like the serval project is operating more at a hardware level that we will be, we only want to use official Android APIs so the app can be installed on stock phones and doesn't require any special base stations, etc. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

@zawarudo Perhaps it would still be worth doing wifi direct (if it's stable) even if the user needs to accept the connection dialog, since that's still easier than the bluetooth pairing and will be much faster.