CloseToMe, an Android BLE library

Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons to do contact tracing

Mohsen Mirhoseini
6 min readMay 6, 2020
CloseToMe Android BLE library

The idea behind the library

While everyone was in the fight with the COVID-19 pandemic our team was thinking about what can help to the post-pandemic era. The time governments allow people to move out of their caves and get back to their normal life.

The main idea was tracing user close contacts and record that data on the user phone anonymously, a solution totally aligned with GDPR (European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation). The moment a user gets a positive COVID result we broadcast that specific user’s anonymous ID and share it with all the other users to ping those who were in close contact with the sick person.

A week after we started the CoviLights open-source Android application, Google and Apple also agreed and announced a similar idea to provide an API and hopefully, they will release it soon:

However, this won’t stop me from releasing this library which can come handy for other use-cases…

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Mohsen Mirhoseini

As an Android developer and tech enthusiast, I publish contents about Android app development. Follow me on Medium and YouTube as "Android Developer Tip".