When the same app acts as a Bonjour-enabled service and client at the same time, browsing for self-like services while listening on a socket, what's a good way to exclude self from service search results?
In the server part, when I register my service with Bonjour, I generate a 10 character random alphanumeric string - a cookie. I make it a part of the advertised service name, as provided in call to [NSNetService initWithDomain:type:name:port:]. The resulting name is something like "MyApp on Joe's iPhone\txYbG56HjaE". The part before the tab character is for display, the part after is the cookie. I then store the cookie is a globally visible variable. Since server initialization takes place on app startup, the cookie value is available early on.
In the service discovery part, when I find a service, I check its name; if the cookie is the same as the stored global one, I skip this service. The idea is that other running instances of the program would have different cookie values, because randomness.
Naturally, when displaying discovered service names in the UI, I skip the part after the tab character.