Bluetooth SIG defined profiles vs Vendor Defined Profile

[soumil]

Hi,

What is the advantage of using a Bluetooth SIG defined profile over a vendor specific profile? For example, if we want to transfer battery levels, can we define our own batteryService rather than using the Bluetooth SIG Battery Service? In terms of qualification and certification process, would additional testing be needed if we use Bluetooth SIG profiles?

[endnode]

It's simply interoperability. BT SIG profiles are defined and free to use. If you public your profile or just GATT Service specification on the internet they are probably equal in sense that anyone is able to read them and implement then in their device. So finally BT SIG profiles are more likely to be "natively" implemented (e.g. in things like Android/iOS/Windows BLE stack or some higher layer applications) and therefore you can choose to use standard profile and then hope that other parties will develop peer devices implementing counterparts, all will work together and you will make money on working ecosystem.

In opposite if you design "closed" solution where only your device or apps will talk to each other on both peers then you don't need to implement standard profile and you can define yours. Sometimes you even don't want other apps and vendors to "parasite" on your solution so you want to define your proprietary profile/service/protocols. Yes, they can reverse engineer it but at least you increase the cost for them. So it's all just framework and depending on your business model you should choose your way.

In terms of qualification I believe there are some tests as part of BT SIG certification if you implement certain Profile and Services. However it shouldn't be a big problem, BT SIG testing in the lab should have stable test framework which has all ready inside.