Native Development

[cornplay]

I can't find this information anywhere and I don't have BB10 Dev Alpha.

Do I need to specify some permission in the manifest to be able to leverage NFC functionality in my native app?

[MSohm]

Currently there are no native documented NFC APIs supported on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha.

Edit:  Corrected.  Some NFC APIs do exist, just not documented yet.

[HorizonXP]

Uh, what? Pretty sure we saw NFC demo'd at the Jam, and there are most definitely libraries included in the NDK.

Cornplay, I'm unaware of any permissions requirements to use NFC, but TBH, RIM should probably incorporate something for that if they want to maintain platform security.

[mwoolley]

Hi

NFC APIs for tag reading and writing and SNEP are available to the Dev Alpha/NDK10.0.0.4 developer. I've not seen any need for permissions yet (and I have code working for NFC on Dev Alpha) but agree it's likely this will be a requirement. I'm looking into this now and will post again if I find out more.

Regards

Martin

[mwoolley · Accepted solution]

I can confirm that there are no permissions associated with NFC that need to be set in the application descriptor xml file.

[HorizonXP]

Martin, do you think that it should be something that is added?

[mwoolley]

No, we take care of NFC security in a variety of other ways including:

1. We allow users to turn NFC off- in which case implicit sharing will not be possible
2. We turn NFC off when backlight is off, so no data can leak unless the user is interacting with the device
3. You have to tap another device when NFC is on, backlight is on, the device is unlocked and you have a running application implementing NFC push on the foreground in order to send any data

[komanaki]

Will there be documentation for NFC peer-to-peer (SNEP) too ?

Thanks !

[mwoolley]

There will be documentation for all the BlackBerry 10 APIs emerging as we head towards the final release :-)

That said, watch this space (or better still, follow @mdwrim on Twitter) as we'll be releasing a knowledge base article explaining how to use SNEP for peer to peer transfer on BlackBerry 10 along with working code very, very soon!

[komanaki]

Wow, that's what i call fast reply !

Great, i'll wait for that article and i just followed you.