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Community & Business Groups

Web Bluetooth Community Group

Bluetooth is a standard for short-range wireless communication between devices. This group is developing a specification for Bluetooth APIs to allow websites to communicate with devices in a secure and privacy-preserving way. In particular the web Bluetooth API focuses on minimizing the device attack surface exposed to malicious websites, possibly by removing access to some existing Bluetooth features that are hard to implement securely. Further, the API takes the approach of a user interface to select and approve access to devices as opposed to using certification and installation.

Most of our activity happens in our GitHub repository, with supporting code in adjacent repositories in the WebBluetoothCG GitHub organization.

WebBluetoothCG/web-bluetooth
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.

GATT Communication is shipped in Chrome on Android, Mac, and ChromeOS

The Chrome team has announced a subset of the Web Bluetooth API is now enabled in Chrome on Android, Chrome OS, and Mac. The GATT Communication API enables users to select Bluetooth devices and pair them to a web site, e.g. to control a toy or interact with a retail kiosk. This enables greater convenience, and less security risk (via least privilege), than installation of a native application.

Check out the updated Chrome implementation status page to learn more about what is currently shipped and what is coming next.

An Android device connecting to a BLE-enabled heart rate monitor via the web.

Interesting TPAC breakout sessions

If you’re at W3C TPAC, there are some interesting breakout sessions today.

I’m running a session in room 108 from 14:30 to 15:30 on device APIs (including Bluetooth, NFC, USB and more), their privacy implications, and the permissions we should ask users about when granting access.

Mark Foltz is running a session on improving interoperability between NFC, Bluetooth, Sensors, Presentation, etc. in room 104 from 16:00 to 17:00.

Please comment here if there are other sessions especially interesting to Web Bluetooth folks.