Ask HN: Bonjour-like Service Discovery on Android?

4 points

10 years ago

I'm trying to build a simple proximity based multiplayer game across devices as a fun side project.

I found Bonjour for iOS & Avahi for Linux to work without hiccup for transferring data. Android has been a nightmare. I'm trying to encompass all devices I own (which includes a Gingerbread device) and have tried the following options -

1) Android's NSD Manager - Works 4.1+, quite slow and pronounced very buggy by most devs. Crashes quite often in my experience.

2) Google's Nearby Connections API (https://developers.google.com/nearby/) - Works 4.1+, but communicates only with Android / iOS - can't get it to communicate with the laptop.

3) jmDNS - Works 2.1+, but still buggy and slower than Bonjour speeds. Also, looks like the project has been abandoned so am further worried about bug fixes. This is what I am currently using.

Does anyone have suggestions for better mDNS service implementations that can give Bonjour-like performance on Android devices?

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