We just launched BLE Advertiser on the Play Store, and I want to walk you through exactly what it does — because the concept takes five seconds to explain but the depth of what you can do with it is easy to underestimate.
Every BLE project hits the same bottleneck: you’re writing code but waiting on hardware. A dev board to ship. A sensor to arrive. Someone’s test device to borrow. The frustrating part is that most of what you need to test has nothing to do with the hardware itself — you just need something on the Bluetooth spectrum that looks like the device your app expects.
BLE Advertiser fixes that. It turns your Android phone into a real Bluetooth peripheral — not a simulation inside a test framework, but actual BLE advertisement packets going over the air. Open nRF Connect or any scanner on another device, and your phone shows up as a Heart Rate Monitor, an iBeacon, a Smart Lock, or anything else you configure it as. No firmware. No hardware. No waiting.
Here’s every feature, explained properly.
20+ Predefined Profiles — Pick One and Start Broadcasting
The fastest way to get something advertising is the predefined profile list. BLE Advertiser ships with 20+ ready-to-use device types across every major BLE category:
Beacons — iBeacon (Apple), Eddystone (Google), AltBeacon. All three formats are supported with the correct advertisement structure, so beacon-scanning apps pick them up correctly.
Health and Medical — Heart Rate Monitor, Blood Pressure Monitor, Glucose Monitor, Pulse Oximeter, Thermometer, Weight Scale. Each profile follows the official Bluetooth GATT specification for that device type, so health apps that expect standard service UUIDs get exactly what they’re looking for.
Fitness — Cycling Speed and Cadence Sensor, Running Speed and Cadence Sensor.
Environment — Temperature Sensor, Humidity Sensor, Barometric Pressure Sensor, Air Quality Sensor.
Motion — Accelerometer, Proximity Sensor, Light Sensor.
Smart Home — Smart Lock, Smart Bulb, Smart Switch.
Wearables — Smart Watch, Fitness Band, Smart Speaker.
You don’t need to know anything about Bluetooth UUIDs, GATT profiles, or advertisement packet formats. Pick a profile, tap Advertise, and your phone is broadcasting. Another device scanning for a Heart Rate Monitor will find it immediately.
Custom BLE Profile Builder — Design Any Device You Can Imagine
The predefined profiles cover the standard cases. The custom builder is for everything else.
If you’re building a BLE device with your own service structure — proprietary UUIDs, custom data formats, non-standard characteristic layouts — you can design it visually inside BLE Advertiser without writing a single line of code.
Here’s what you control:
Services and Characteristics — Add as many services as you need. Under each service, define individual characteristics with any UUID (standard 16-bit or custom 128-bit). You choose what data each characteristic exposes: a number, a text string, or raw byte sequences.
Permissions — Set each characteristic as readable, writable, or subscribable (notify/indicate). If your app subscribes to notifications, BLE Advertiser can simulate the peripheral sending updates.
Device Identity — Name the device exactly as it should appear to scanners. Add manufacturer data attached to any company ID — Apple, Google, Samsung, Nordic, or your own.
Advertisement Data — Control exactly what’s in the broadcast packet: which services are advertised, what manufacturer data is included, whether a scan response is available.
The result is a complete virtual Bluetooth device. If your app connects to it and tries to read a characteristic, it gets back the data you configured. This is the fastest way to iterate on BLE integration before your actual hardware is ready.
Full Signal Control — BLE 5.0, Legacy 4.x, and Everything in Between
Different testing scenarios need different signal configurations. BLE Adv gives you control over every parameter that matters.
BLE Version Support
Extended Advertising (BLE 5.0) — up to 251 bytes per packet, faster data rates, longer range on the Coded PHY. If your phone supports BLE 5.0, the app uses it automatically.
Legacy Advertising (BLE 4.x) — standard 31-byte packets with optional scan response, compatible with all devices. Falls back to this automatically on older phones.
PHY Selection — Manually choose 1M PHY (standard range and speed), 2M PHY (faster, shorter range), or Coded PHY (longer range, lower speed). Useful when you’re testing how your app handles devices at different signal qualities.
TX Power — Four presets from Ultra Low to Ultra High, or set a custom value. Simulating a weak device signal or testing RSSI-based distance estimation is straightforward.
Advertising Interval — Fast (100ms), Balanced (500ms), Slow (1000ms), or a custom interval in milliseconds. Slower intervals use less battery; faster ones make the device more discoverable.
Connectable vs. Non-connectable — Control whether scanners can actually connect and read characteristics, or just see the advertisement.
Scannable — Decide whether devices can request additional data via scan response.
Timeout — Set the advertising to stop automatically after a defined duration. Useful for timed test scenarios.
Smart Triggers — Advertising That Runs Itself
This is the feature that surprised me most when I was building it, because once you use it, going back to manually starting and stopping advertising feels painful.
Triggers let you define conditions that automatically start or stop broadcasting. You set it up once and forget about it.
Time Triggers Schedule advertising at a specific date and time. Set a duration so it stops automatically. Create recurring daily or weekly schedules. Useful for simulating a device that’s only active during certain hours.
WiFi Triggers Start advertising when your phone connects to a specific WiFi network. Stop when it disconnects. This one is genuinely useful for office or lab setups — your phone starts behaving as a BLE device the moment you’re on the right network, without any manual action.
Location Triggers (Geofencing) Define a location and a radius. BLE Advertiser starts advertising when you enter that area and stops when you leave. You can set up multiple locations with different profiles — walk into a store, your phone starts simulating a proximity beacon; leave, it stops.
Battery Triggers Start or stop advertising based on battery percentage or charging state. Prevents the app from draining your battery on a long test run.
Boot Trigger Advertising resumes automatically after your phone restarts. No need to reopen the app and restart everything manually.
A setup that combines these: iBeacon profile, WiFi trigger for the office network, active between 9am and 6pm daily. Once configured, the phone handles it entirely on its own.
Background Operation — It Keeps Running
Android is aggressive about killing background processes to save battery. Most Bluetooth tools stop working the moment you lock your screen or switch apps. BLE Advertiser runs as a foreground service, which means it operates continuously regardless of what else your phone is doing.
Advertising keeps going when:
The screen is off
You’re using other apps
The phone has been restarted (if the boot trigger is enabled)
A persistent notification stays visible so you always know what’s active and can stop any profile with a single tap. You’re not left guessing whether the app is still running.
You can also run multiple profiles simultaneously — useful for testing how your app handles several nearby BLE devices at the same time, or for setting up a multi-beacon indoor positioning test.
Live Activity Log — See Exactly What’s Happening
BLE Advertiser shows you a real-time log of every advertising event as it happens. This is more useful than it sounds when you’re debugging.
The log shows:
When advertising starts and stops for each profile
Errors and warnings (failed advertisement attempts, permission issues)
Event timestamps
You can filter the log by individual profile or view the global feed across all active profiles. Pause the live feed when you need to read something without it scrolling past. Export the full log as a file to share with your team or attach to a bug report. Auto-cleanup keeps old entries from piling up.
Profile Management — Organize, Back Up, Share
Once you’ve built a configuration that works, you probably don’t want to rebuild it from scratch every time. BLE Advertiser has a full profile management system.
Save any profile — predefined or custom — with a name. Saved profiles appear in your list and can be started with a single tap.
Duplicate an existing profile and modify the copy. Fast way to create variations of a configuration without starting from zero.
Import and Export profiles as files. Export a profile to your phone storage, send it to a teammate, or back it up. They import it in BLE Advertiser on their device and have the exact same configuration. No manual re-entry.
Quick Toggles — start or stop any saved profile from the profile list without navigating into it.
The Interface
BLE Advertiser uses Material Design with smooth transitions and a layout that works on both phones and tablets. Dark Mode is fully supported — Light, Dark, or follow-system setting, your choice. An interactive tutorial walks you through the app on first launch so you know where everything is. Multiple languages are supported.
It’s designed to feel like a tool, not a demo app. The controls you need are accessible without digging through menus.
Real-World Use Cases
BLE App Development — Test your app’s Bluetooth integration without physical hardware. Simulate the exact device your app expects, including edge cases like weak signals, unexpected characteristic values, or devices that go offline mid-session.
IoT Prototyping — Validate your app’s behavior against a simulated peripheral before your firmware is ready. Iterate on the BLE service structure in BLE Advertiser instead of flashing the device every time you change a UUID.
Healthcare App Testing — Simulate a glucose monitor, pulse oximeter, or heart rate cuff to test every scenario your health app needs to handle — bad readings, out-of-range values, dropped connections — without needing the physical medical device.
Indoor Positioning / Navigation — Place several phones running different iBeacon configurations around a building. Prototype and tune your positioning algorithm before purchasing any hardware.
QA and Edge Case Testing — Reproduce specific device behaviors that are hard to control with real hardware: specific RSSI values, malformed data, simultaneous device collisions, rapid connect-disconnect cycles.
Learning BLE — The fastest way to understand how Bluetooth Low Energy advertising actually works is to create a device, broadcast it, and scan it from another phone. BLE Advertiser makes that loop immediate and hands-on.
Getting Started
Download BLE Advertiser on Google Play
The quickest test: pick Heart Rate Monitor from the predefined profiles, tap Advertise, then open nRF Connect on another device. Your phone appears in the scan list immediately.
For custom devices: tap Custom BLE, add your services and characteristics, configure the advertisement data, set any triggers you want, and hit Advertise.
Follow tutorials and updates at @bleadvertiserapp on Medium.
If BLE Adv saves you time, a rating on the Play Store helps other developers find it.
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