# Adopting Wi-Fi Aware Add entitlements and declare your app’s services. ## Overview The Wi-Fi Aware™ technology enables devices to securely discover, pair, and communicate with nearby devices without an internet connection or access point. Your app can use the Wi-Fi Aware framework to securely establish peer-to-peer (P2P) connections between Wi-Fi devices. If you intend your app to use Wi-Fi Aware capabilities, you need to add the `com.apple.developer.wifi-aware` entitlement. The value of the entitlement is an array of capability strings, where the strings specify the Wi-Fi Aware operations and API capabilities your app intends to use. |Capability string|Permission description | |-----------------|-----------------------------------------------------| |`Publish` |Publish a service and allow incoming connections. | |`Subscribe` |Subscribe to a service and make outgoing connections.| ## Declare services Services are the specific functionality and protocols that your app can either provide to other devices or consume from other devices. There are two supported service roles in Wi-Fi Aware: - **Publisher**: Your app hosts the service and acts as a server that allows incoming connections from other paired devices. For example, your app publishes its availability to other devices to print documents. - **Subscriber**: Your app uses the service and acts as the client that makes outgoing connections to other paired devices. For example, your app finds friends to connect to in a game. Wi-Fi Aware can support multiple services simultaneously, and can also act as a publisher, subscriber, or both. As such, your app can: - Publish one or more services. - Subscribe to one or more services. - Simultaneously publish and subscribe the same services. - Publish one set of services, while subscribing to a different set of services. > Note: Your app can only publish a given service at most once per device, so it can’t publish multiple instances of the same service. To minimize resource cost, avoid simultaneously subscribing to the same service multiple times. Declare the services you want to use with the WiFiAwareServices key in your app’s Information property list. The key’s value is the dictionary where *keys* are names of services your app uses and *values* are dictionaries of service configuration information, which is in the Info pane of the target editor in Xcode. Each key under the `WiFiAwareServices` entry is the fully qualified name of a service as it’s sent over the air. It’s populated in the `name` field of the resulting [`WAPublishableService`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WAPublishableService) and [`WASubscribableService`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WASubscribableService) structures in the API. For a service name to be valid, it must conform to the rules in [RFC 6763](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6763#section-4.1.2) and [RFC 6335](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6335#section-5.1). The service string needs to have a unique name that: - Only uses characters such as `a–z`, `A–Z`, `0–9`, and hyphen (`-`) - Uses at least one letter `a–z` or `A–Z` - Doesn’t start or end with a hyphen (`-`) - Doesn’t exceed 15 characters The fully qualified service name string needs to have: - An underscore (`_`) before the name of the component - A dot (`.`) separator - A protocol suffix of `_tcp` or `_udp` The following examples show service names that follow the naming conventions: |Name component |Protocol component|Fully qualified service name string in `Info.plist`| |-----------------|------------------|---------------------------------------------------| |`example-service`|`_tcp` |`_example-service._tcp` | |`example-service`|`_udp` |`_example-service._udp` | Use the exact same name in the `Info.plist`. Invalid service names in the `Info.plist` cause your app to crash. ### Configure a service For each service name key in the `WiFiAwareServices` dictionary, there’s a corresponding value dictionary. This dictionary contains a set of properties that configure each individual service. The configuration includes whether the service is published, subscribed, or both: |Configuration key (String)|Configuration value|Use | |--------------------------|-------------------|---------------------------------| |`Publishable` |An empty dictionary|Publishes the configured service | |`Subscribable` |An empty dictionary|Subscribes the configured service| > Important: One or both of the `Publishable` and `Subscribable` keys must be present. If neither key is present, the framework crashes your app. The following is an example of an `Info.plist` that declares a single service `_example-service._tcp` that’s both published and subscribed: ```xml CFBundleIdentifier com.example.MyApp WiFiAwareServices _example-service._tcp Publishable Subscribable ``` ### Access API services After you declare the services your app uses in `Info.plist`, your app can access those services with the Wi-Fi Aware API. For each `Publishable` service, the system creates a [`WAPublishableService`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WAPublishableService) available in [`allServices`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WAPublishableService/allServices). Similarly, for each `Subscribable` service, the system creates a [`WASubscribableService`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WASubscribableService) available in [`allServices`](/documentation/WiFiAware/WASubscribableService/allServices). --- Copyright © 2026 Apple Inc. 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