Connection issues with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Nexus 6

[Mario Amigot]

Since Google released Android Marshmallow 6.0 we are experiencing problems when connecting our nRF51822 based peripherals to a Nexus 6 phone. The Nexus 6 is able to see our peripherals' advertisements while scanning but when it initiates a connection to a peripheral by sending a CONNECT_REQ packet, in that specific nRF51822 the BLE_GAP_EVT_CONNECTED event is never thrown by the S110 softdevice stack so the connection is never established. The thing is that the same application run in a Nexus 5 with Android 6.0 works without any problem.

Has anybody experienced similar issues with Android 6.0 and Nexus 6? Any idea what may be going on or a solution to this?

[Freddy Sørensen]

After my Galaxy S6 was updated to Marsmallow, I start to see the same problem. I do have a device, to which I can't connect with my smartphone. It looks like it's the same problem, as I've seen in the past with HTC phones running Android 5. If you use the sample code like the ble_app_hrs, everything works fine. This is because the advertising data includes a 'name tag'. I didn't have space for a 'name tag' in my adv_data, so I solved the problem by adding the 'name tag' to the response_req. So right now I have thousands of BLE-devices on the market, which won't connect anymore, when the owners smartphones are updated to Marshmallow :-(