Location needs to be enabled for Bluetooth Low Energy Scanning on Android 6.0

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No, this is not a bug.

This issue was brought up to Google where they responded saying that this was the intended behavior and they won’t fix it. They directed developers to this site where it points out that location permission is now needed for hardware identifier access. It is now the developer’s responsibility to make their users aware of the requirement.

In the issue, however, it doesn’t address why Location services (GPS, etc.) are required and it doesn’t seem like they are going to revisit the issue to explain this since it has been marked as the intended behavior.

To answer the second part of the question: Yes, it is possible to scan without enabling Location services. You can do a Bluetooth classic scan using BluetoothAdapter.getDefaultAdapter().startDiscovery() and that will work with Location services off. This will discover all Bluetooth devices, BLE and otherwise. However, BLE devices won’t have a scan record that they would have had if they were seen as a result of startScan().

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