Systems and methods for application level authentication are provided for use with the low energy Bluetooth device and accessory. This includes receiving accessory credentials from a server, establishing a Bluetooth low energy connection with the accessory, authenticating with the accessory, and lastly transferring data to the accessory. The transferring of the data may be either a bulk transfer, or a data stream. The authenticating may be an application layer authentication between a device and the accessory using a shared secret key and using a hash function. Additional embodiments include methods for over-the-air firmware updates, and device control of a low energy Bluetooth accessory.