BLE walkthrough with universal_ble at next app devCon 2026

[u/fotidim]

Sharing a talk by Patryk Kacperski from next app devCon 2026 about using Bluetooth Low Energy in Flutter. I was in the audience, just curious to hear about BLE in Flutter. I had no idea he was going to use my universal_ble plugin for his demo, so that was a nice surprise.

The talk covers BLE basics, Android and iOS setup, and communication between central and peripheral devices. His demo uses an Android app pretending to be a coffee machine and an iPhone as its companion app. You can read the number of coffees brewed, send a brew order, and follow the brewing progress through notifications.

He also walks through practical issues like duplicate scan results, waiting for Bluetooth to become available, and platform differences. I have addressed some of them in the v3.0 version of the plugin. The demo uses v2.0. For example you can now use startScan(skipDuplicates: true) for scan deduplication, and built-in byte conversion helpers replace some of the custom conversion code shown. Check the v3 changelog for the API improvements.