nRF Master Control panel not working with android marshmallow

[Daniel Abraham]

I am using nRF Master Control panel for testing my peripheral changes. It works fine until i upgrade my nexus 5 to android Marshmallow. Now the app cant even find BLE device during scan.

Seems like Marshmallow is strict, Need to get permission before accessing BLE layer. Please advise.

[Aleksander Nowakowski]

Hi,

In my opinion it's not a bug. Beacons can be used to determine user's location, so both the location permission and enabling location service should be required if an app wants to scan for BLE devices. I'd rather said that before it was a 'bug' or a hole in security. An app still may connect and use bonded devices without location permission nor the service which is also correct.

The next version of nRF MCP will show a message in case the permission is not granted or location service is disabled.

[endnode]

Hi Aleksander,

I understand the intention but if this should be "security fix" then something is wrong (I mean worse then it is already) with Android dev team. Just because I need to do scanning for few minutes I now expose my location to all apps which are eagerly waiting for it and I've seen end users who need to use BLE without bonding during whole day (yes, bonding doesn't scale so having all security on application layer - especially considering how pathetic default security of BT Smart is - is not the option but way to go) and by forcing them to enable location they drained the battery in few hours (because they enabled "precise" location with GPS by mistake) or just degraded battery life time significantly (because suddenly dozens of apps start to use location for tracking of whatever).