Bluetooth Inspector

Discover nearby Bluetooth peripherals and inspect their services for information and characteristics.

• View information and signal strength for all peripherals and devices, updating in real time as you move around.

• Get battery level for your own Apple devices — no need to install the app on all your devices.

• See model identification broadcast by devices around you, mapping device identifiers to the marketing name.

• Extract software and firmware version strings from devices broadcasting this information.

• Read any characteristic's value, even for services not well known and are custom to the device being interrogated.

• Write characteristic values back to the peripheral as string, numeric or hex.

• See a history of the value of a characteristic since the session started, timestamped to when the value changed.

• Log found peripherals, services, characteristics and values, and export a .log file of timestamped events for your analysis.

• Shortcuts integration with actions for scanning and interrogation, enumerating services and characteristics, and reading values.

• Background scanning by advertised service IDs with device count mapped by location found and status shown in a Live Activity.

Get support @grgarside or georgegarside.com/apps/bluetooth-inspector

Constant use of Bluetooth connectivity can drain your device's battery. Bluetooth connectivity is only used when this app is in the foreground and up to a few seconds after being backgrounded to safely disconnect from peripherals being interrogated, unless Background Scanning is enabled in the app and the Live Activity is running.

Features:

• Peripherals that haven't been seen recently are greyed out in the list, so devices that have gone quiet are easy to tell apart from those still nearby.

Fixes:

• Writing a second or later value to a characteristic no longer crashes the app.
• Sending a write while viewing a characteristic no longer crashes when the device confirms it.
• Scanning for devices no longer crashes the app when many advertisements arrive at once.
• A new device is no longer listed twice when it advertises several times in quick succession.
• Successful writes now show the value you sent in the write history instead of an empty entry.
• Services a device removes or changes no longer linger alongside the refreshed ones.
• The peripherals toolbar no longer crashes when location isn't available.

Further:

• Peripheral discovery, signal strength updates and received values are now processed on a background actor, keeping the app responsive during intensive scanning.
• Location updates now use the modern Core Location live updates API.