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Comment by aschampion | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of my bluetooth woes are not with bluetooth, but with the complete lack of configurability on Android and other devices.

I end up pairing/unpairing my home speakers with my phone constantly, not because bluetooth is brittle, but because Android doesn't have options like "remember pairing but don't automatically connect with this device", or, "select audio output", or, "do/dont continue playing audio when this device loses connection". Otherwise, when I turn my headphones on to bike to work in the morning, my phone will be paired with the speakers, and the headphone will connect for calls but not audio.

I don't want linux-like configuration. I don't want to root my phone. But having no control on these thousand dollar devices over the most common tasks we use them for despite billions in R&D and tens of thousands of developers is ludicrous.

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> I don't want linux-like configuration.

I want linux-like configuration. It's the only way to be sure.

We at minimum need a user friendly way to change anything first.

More options are great, but currently we have none, and if it requires root access it'd be useless to most "regular" consumers.

Linux like configuration is utterly terrible. At least with iOS there's usually two modes: it either connects or it doesn't. When it connects, it works flawlessly. For Linux, it's a variety of possibilities including but not limited to: able to discover device but can't pair, pairs but unable to send any files, Bluetooth daemon crashes two seconds after pairing (GUI hangs and you have to manually grep through the logcat to figure out what went wrong), Bluetooth pairs but on reboot daemon fails to start with a cryptic error code. On googling the error code leads to a post on Ubuntu StackExchange from 5 years ago that references a post on the Arch Linux forum from even further back. On IRC support, you would be recommended to install Blueman/Bluez/whatever-their-favorite-bluetooth-software on top of your distro's version. And after a whole afternoon, it still wouldn't work. When you write a blog post complaining about it, people would tell you in the comment thread to go replace your device with a "ThinkPad" cause Linux is not supposed to run properly on most laptops despite being marketed as such. And then finally two months later someone posts a comment telling you to flip an entry on an obscure config file somewhere deep within the system and the problem magically goes away. So no, I don't want Linux-like configs.

A better solution would be more robust cross platform Bluetooth stacks. We have tons of high quality, open source TCP/IP networking software, elliptic curve cryptography and key exchange libraries. The same needs to be done for Bluetooth. If companies like Google have enough money to relaunch and rebrand IoT home assistants every other week and publish new networking stacks written in Go for their latest container orchestrator/mobile OS/browser every 6 months then I am sure they can find time and funding for better Bluetooth firmware.

> At least with iOS there's usually two modes: it either connects or it doesn't.

Those two modes aren't quite good enough, though. One recent fun episode occurred when I walked up to our house and started doing some work outside, while both I and someone inside were listening to music. For some reason, my phone automatically disconnected from my headphones, and connected to the bluetooth speaker inside, somehow disconnecting whatever it was originally connected to. So, for the person inside, the bluetooth speaker stopped playing their music and started playing something random, which proceeded to start and stop a few times, and then get louder and louder and LOUDER while I was standing outside, fiddling with my phone and headphones, trying to figure out why my music stopped playing.

My guess is that the root cause is that there's a crippling design flaw at the root of the Bluetooth spec: Its original designers apparently never considered the possibility that multiple people might share their electronics.

You are confusing configuration flexibility with bugs.

The more configuration flexibility you have, the more bugs you will have.

It's, IMO, due to how 99.9% of the world uses their bluetooth. It could have options to control these things but for most people, they just don't care. They might own one pair of bluetooth headphones and one bluetooth mouse and one car that pairs to their phone, and that would be about it.

So ironically it was designed to do anything & everything, like USB, but now it's a two-trick pony.

It’s funny, anytime anyone mentions the loss of the 3.5mm jack on flagship phones, the loud Bluetooth brigade conveniently forgets just how inconvenient Bluetooth can be.

My experience with Apple and Bose devices has been pretty flawless, across keyboards/mice, headphones and speakers.

I'm curious if the problems are with Android, with non-premium speakers/headphones, or a combination of the two? And why? (Is it not following the spec, bad UX, or insufficient QA/testing?)

> My experience with Apple and Bose devices has been pretty flawless

Mine have been terrible. I have a 2018 MB Pro and a pair of QC35 II and it stutters dozens of times during the day. Before that I had a 2014 MB Pro and a cheapo BT headphone and have similar issues.

I had been using bluetooth headphones without issues for a few years. After moving into a new apartment, I started having all kinds of intermittent problems. Turns out the microwaves in the apartment complex were pretty bad, causing a ton of 2.4GHz noise. The Chromecast would also start dropping video streams whenever my roommate would cook stuff. Is there a source of a ton of 2.4GHz noise causing your problems?

That makes a lot of sense. I had to upgrade to a newer 5 GHz router because the 2.4 was impossible to use, and I do live in an apartment complex. Thanks for the insight.

The bluetooth on my MBP2017 seems to work like shit if I try to use my bluetooth headphones (Plantronics Voyager 8200UC) and a bluetooth mouse (Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse 3600). The sound will stutter and the mouse will lag, no matter if I reset the OS, and I even got the MBP replaced under AppleCare yet it didn't resolve the matter.

None of this happens with those two peripherals on my Dell work laptop (Dell Precision 5200).

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