ESP32 bluetooth discovery parse names

Question

I'm running a sample code from ESP32 examples and I'm scanning available BLE devices. I can see device MAC address etc. But for few devices I can't see their names.
I am using ESP-WROOM-32 with hardware support checked out directly from their github (some bugs were fixed earlier on github than via lib manager)

When I use LightBlue app for discovery of BLE Devices I can see names for more devices that ESP. What can I change to see the names correctly? OR Can how can I parse device name from the data I'm receiving?

This callback code

class MyAdvertisedDeviceCallbacks: public BLEAdvertisedDeviceCallbacks {
    void onResult(BLEAdvertisedDevice advertisedDevice) {
      Serial.printf("Advertised Device: %s \n", advertisedDevice.toString().c_str());
      Serial.print(" RSSI: ");
      Serial.println(advertisedDevice.getRSSI());
    }
};

produces this output:

Advertised Device: Name: , Address: 1d:0c:c7:3a:fb:c6, manufacturer data: 4c0009060378c0a81f12, payload: 1073609632 
 RSSI: -75

Answer 1

Bluetooth has two ways of dealing with device names. A device can optionally choose to advertise its device name. It also has to respond to a "get device name" request. The former is passive, and is what you normally see when scanning. The latter is active and requires you to connect to the device and make a request. If the device doesn't advertise the device name then the only way you can get the name is to make a GATT "Name Characteristic" request to the device. The ESP32 doesn't (AFAIK) do that automatically because these things are designed to be "light weight". Your heavier-weight "reference" software can go off and do more things because it's a full-blown application.

You can sometimes see the difference in the devices because your reference application might populate the list of devices with a combination of MAC addresses and names, and then replace the MAC addresses with names in a later step. Also it probably caches names that it has queried in the past.