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I'm looking for a way to find users in a certain radius of your position. The reason I need this is because I want to know how many people there are in an area. A possible way I found is to activate the bluetooth and find active devices around.

I want to know if there are other solutions, API, possibilities to do this.

Michael A
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Verhelst
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2 Answers2

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There was talk of peer to peer wifi connections, but not sure the status. Would give you some more distance than bluetooth. There is also a library

Can Android do peer-to-peer ad-hoc networking?

there is also a library from qualcomm

https://developer.qualcomm.com/develop/mobile-technologies/peer-peer-alljoyn/faq

Community
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MikeIsrael
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  • Thank you very much for this information. Seems very useful. I will take a look at it too. Is there perhaps a way to use some kind of cellID, like finding people that doesn't have a Android device and don't need an app active? – Verhelst Dec 27 '11 at 18:40
  • probably not unless you are a government agency :) I think a lot of countries have laws against private citizens having that ability. – MikeIsrael Dec 27 '11 at 20:50
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Your best bet would probably be with searching for bluetooth devices.

Most phones have a class 2 bluetooth radio which is generally rated at a range of 10 m, but it can very greatly on the environment (for example, you would notice significant packet loss transmitting through even a small amount of water, such as in a person.) On the other side of the coin, the radio could detect devices up to 100 m away if there were nothing but air between the two devices.

The main problem with this is that you would have to require bluetooth to be active, which a lot of users might not have by default.

Alex Paino
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  • Thanks, this is what I thought too. Any other advice? – Verhelst Dec 28 '11 at 16:38
  • Well from what I can understand you want to be able to find all of the users around a certain user. You will have to install an app on each of those devices to be able to detect them, so it really comes down to what range you are looking for. If you wanted a much larger range, I would just try GPS. – Alex Paino Dec 28 '11 at 21:25