California-based IoT device development platform Golioth has announced a connectivity management tool designed from the ground up to be protocol-agnostic, starting with Bluetooth support.

Golioth Connectivity eliminates the traditional complexity of managing different connectivity protocols by providing flexible SDKs and dashboards that work identically across Bluetooth, cellular, wifi and, in the future, LoRaWan, Can bus and custom protocols.

The tool addresses a critical pain point in IoT development: the significant time and resources required to integrate different connectivity protocols. Traditional IoT development requires separate SDKs, APIs, security implementations and management tools for each connectivity type, often adding three to six months of development time per protocol.

“The connectivity integration tax has held back IoT innovation for too long,” said Jonathan Beri, CEO of Golioth. “Engineering teams shouldn’t have to rebuild the same connectivity functionality for each protocol they support. Solving for repetitive, undifferentiated IoT infrastructure is the premise of our platform, where we’ve solved device and data management for developers. With Golioth Connectivity we can add transport as a solved problem, so developers can focus their energy on building features that create customer value.”

Golioth Connectivity introduces a transport abstraction layer through the company’s Pouch transport (github.com/golioth/pouch), letting developers use the same services and APIs for device management functions regardless of how devices connect to the cloud. The same services that handle over-the-air (OTA) updates for Bluetooth devices work seamlessly for cellular and, in the future, even more deployments.

Capabilities include:

• Flexible firmware interface: Consistent APIs for OTA updates, device settings, data streaming and remote procedure calls across all connectivity types
• Single dashboard: Unified device management console for mixed-protocol deployments
• End-to-end security: Built-in encryption treating gateways as untrusted, ensuring security across non-IP protocols
• Future-proof architecture: Add protocols without changing application code

“Bluetooth is well known as a technology that enables low-cost nodes and a low power profile,” said Chris Gammell from Golioth. “Now that Golioth services are available to Bluetooth developers, they can design systems faster than ever before, and know that their fleet is updatable from the first day with Golioth’s OTA capabilities.”

Kyle Matthews, director of firmware at Blur Product Development (blurpd.com), a firm based out of North Carolina that specialises in Bluetooth-enabled devices, added: “Pouch creates a new mental model for Bluetooth developers. They can build applications for intermittently connected devices as though they have a constant connection to the cloud.”

The platform launches with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) support (docs.golioth.io/connectivity/protocols/bluetooth) in open beta, including:

• Stream data uplink from BLE devices to cloud
• OTA firmware updates delivered over BLE
• Open-source gateway firmware for Nordic Thingy91x and nRF9160 development kits, and the NXP FRDM-RW612
• End-to-end encryption with gateways treated as untrusted
• Console integration with network topology visualisation

Pricing for Bluetooth connectivity is free for static BLE devices connected to a consistent gateway, with roaming devices charged $0.50 per month when connecting across multiple gateways.

To support Bluetooth, Golioth developed a custom transport designed for devices with intermittent connectivity. This transport makes it possible for Golioth to add support rapidly for additional protocols to the platform and has already improved data and power efficiency over previously supported protocols.

“In tackling Bluetooth connectivity, we wanted to take a holistic approach to supporting constrained devices that are unable to connect directly to the cloud,” said Dan Mangum, CTO at Golioth. “Rather than a traditional bespoke gateway approach, we rethought what truly portable connectivity for these devices could look like, and redesigned our architecture to ensure that devices can send and receive the exact data they need; nothing more, nothing less.”

Golioth Connectivity with Bluetooth support (blog.golioth.io/bluetooth-open-beta) is available immediately in open beta. Developers can create a free account at console.golioth.io and begin streaming BLE device data in under five minutes. Documentation, tutorials and open-source gateway firmware are available at docs.golioth.io/connectivity.

While this open beta focuses on BLE, Pouch is designed to be extensible and will soon support additional protocols such as LoRa, Can bus and Modbus. This paves the way for broader support of gateway-based communication strategies across diverse IoT deployments.

Founded in 2020, Golioth (golioth.io) provides an IoT device management platform used by embedded developers worldwide. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with a globally distributed team of embedded systems experts.