Make use of external hardware Music controls in my custom App

Question

I'm looking for a way to detect the buttons pressed of external music control buttons, I have integrated in my car via bluetooth. Is it possible to make use of them in my App for something else that playing and stoping music?

Thanks a lot! Markus

Answer 1

Those controls are probably talking to your iPhone using the remote control lingo, part of iAP (iPod Accessory Protocol). For documentation on this, you need to join Apple's MFi program, which is a separate account to a normal developer account and quite a bit more difficult to get approved for.

I'm not certain whether it's possible to get your application to talk to those devices, as you need to specifically enable application communication on the device itself and there's an authentication scheme you need to handle.