LightBlue® vs Periphery

LightBlue® by Punch Through® Your ultimate BLE debugging and development toolkit. Trusted by BLE developers and engineers since 2012 to scan, inspect, and troubleshoot Bluetooth Low Energy devices with precision. Scan For Peripherals  Discover, connect, and interact with nearby BLE devices. Quickly view advertising peripherals, sort by signal strength (RSSI), and connect with a single tap. Once connected, explore the device's advertisement data, services, and characteristics. Isolate SDK Issues  Simplify debugging by pinpointing issues in your BLE SDKs. LightBlue lets you isolate your app's business logic and focus on core tasks like connecting, scanning, reading, writing, and receiving notifications, built on years of BLE development experience and platform best practices. Mimic Your Devices  Prototype your application by creating virtual BLE peripherals. Build a profile from scratch or clone an advertising peripheral to mimic your product's functionality, even before your own firmware is ready. Key features: - Scan and discover BLE peripherals nearby - Browse services and characteristics in detail - Read, write, and subscribe to notifications and indications - Send data from notifications to AWS IoT or Adafruit IO via Cloud Connect - Write to characteristics in Hex, Octal, Binary, Decimal, or ASCII - Clone peripheral profiles or build your own from scratch - Advertise as a custom peripheral to simulate your device - Thoroughly log and share BLE events - Available on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android LightBlue started in 2012 as an internal tool. Punch Through built it to test and debug BLE devices while working on client projects. It worked well, so we shared it with the community. We've kept it free ever since. Today, LightBlue is used by solo developers and engineering teams alike, including inside some of the world's most respected tech and device companies.

Professional Bluetooth LE scanner and debugger for iOS. Periphery gives developers, engineers, and power users a complete toolkit for inspecting Bluetooth Low Energy devices. Scan nearby devices, read GATT services and characteristics, write values, and subscribe to notifications — all in one elegant app. FEATURES - Scan and discover nearby BLE devices in real time - Full GATT inspector: browse services, characteristics, and descriptors - Read, write, and subscribe to BLE characteristics - Automatic UUID identification for known devices - Device fingerprinting: identify chips from Nordic, ESP32, Xiaomi, Shelly - Offline UUID database — no internet required - Dark interface optimized for hardware labs - Find lost Bluetooth devices, tags, and trackers by signal strength (RSSI) with a live proximity meter, a signal graph and an optional beep that speeds up as you get closer - Give devices your own names: they keep them next time and are listed first - Filter the list by minimum signal or hide devices that advertise no name PRO FEATURES Unlock with Periphery Pro: - Unlimited scanning, with no session limit - Session logging: every read, write and notification saved - Unlimited saved sessions, exportable as plain text - No ads, ever FREE VERSION Free to download. The first 3 scan sessions are free, with ads. Unlimited scanning, session logs and no ads need Periphery Pro (subscription or lifetime purchase). BUILT FOR - iOS and embedded developers - IoT engineers and hobbyists - Hardware prototypers - QA engineers testing BLE products - Anyone debugging Bluetooth connectivity - Anyone hunting a lost Bluetooth tag, tracker, or pair of earbuds COMMON QUESTIONS Does it work without an account or internet? Yes to both. Everything happens over Bluetooth on the device. What can it actually see? Any Bluetooth Low Energy device advertising nearby: name, address, RSSI, advertisement data, then the full GATT tree — services, characteristics, descriptors — with read, write and notify. Can it find my lost earbuds or a tracker? It can tell you whether they are advertising and how strong the signal is, which gets you warmer or colder as you walk. It cannot show a map or a direction: BLE gives signal strength, not bearing. Does it work with classic Bluetooth devices? No. iOS only exposes Bluetooth Low Energy to apps. Car kits and older audio devices that use classic Bluetooth are invisible to any app on the App Store. Why does the address change every few minutes? That is iOS, not the app. Apple rotates the identifier it shows you for privacy, so the same device can appear under different addresses. Does it work on iPad? Yes. Terms of Use: https://masaapps360.com/periphery/terms/ Privacy Policy: https://masaapps360.com/periphery/privacy/