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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Or just update your firmware and then remove the app.

Not just Bose, the Sony WH* series is also guilty of this. Great cans, awful app.

Great headphones would never require an app or updating of the firmware. They should play music as engineered and intended from day one of the purchase of said heaphones, until they no longer work.

I agree they should just work but I also think their could be good cause for an update such as an improved noise cancelation software updates. I would expect that for music playback that just works always even if you decline the update.

I'm curious about the Sony App. What information does it get from the phone? The only kind of sensitive permission it asks for is location, and arguably there's a functionality related to that (change the adaptive sound reduction as a function of where you are). The other permission it asked for is Bluetooth, which I guess is expected since it uses that to talk to the headphones. It never asked for anything else.

I didn't allow it to get my location and I can still get firmware updates and can use it to confirm the codec in use (that's the main reason I have it installed).

Access to the Bluetooth service itself can cause some problems - both in user tracking (as your device notices and is noticed by other discoverable Bluetooth devices), fingerprinting, and through access to the bluetooth data channels (as mentioned in the article with the Bose Connect app)

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/bluetooth-surveillance...

https://www.soundguys.com/bose-allegedly-tracks-your-informa...

It has an app?

Sony has the worst app I’ve ever seen[1], to the point where I legitimately don’t know how it passed the app store vetting process. Paragraphs of text have wrapping disabled so that the text goes off screen (important text, like the TOS!). Text which does have wrapping enabled wraps on character boundaries instead of word boundaries. Bullet-point lists don’t line up. I have no idea how they made it so bad, it feels like it must’ve taken effort to disable things which just work by default?

[1] Circa 2018, I switched to Bose after that...

It also has two buttons. I really don't see the need for an app. Besides that I don't have a phone capable of running an app so that saves me from getting irritated at Sony. Again.

Maybe the vetting process only applies to peasants and not the likes of Sony.

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