Host Card Emulation - is it possible to transfer a string from one phone to another?

Question

I'm currently developing an app that is looking at transferring an ID number from one phone to another using NFC.

I do not want to use Android Beam because that takes too long. Instead I'm looking at Host Card Emulation where one phone can behave like an NFC tag storing the ID number and the other phone can behave as a NFC reader that reads the other phone and receives the ID number.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Yes, that's possible. If both devices run Android 4.4+, one device can operate in HCE mode and the other device can operate in reader mode (NfcAdapter.enableReaderMode()). The reader-mode device can then select the HCE application on the other device and can send/receive APDUs (containing arbitrary data, e.g. a unique identifier).