Just to see if I understand how to code everything properly, and to help illustrate the issue, I've been following this tutorial:
https://www.ralfebert.de/ios/tutorials/multipeer-connectivity/
It's a good one to illustrate the problem because there's not much coding before the problem reveals itself. Of course, I immediately ran into the problem others have reported with the new requirements with iOS14, and I've added the required entries into the info.plist. This had the desired effect of eliminating the error message appearing in the debug window at run time, it also triggered a popup requesting access from the user, and the app appears in the settings, privacy, Local Network listing. So that is not the problem.
The problem is that my service doesn't seem to be advertising even though I'm not getting any error messages. On the tutorial I link, there is a step, "Check that the service is advertised on the local network". The service is not appearing. Why? Is there something missing in that tutorial up to that point?