By the way, it's so bad that I don't use headphones anymore with the iPhone. I use the phone in speaker mode. And the only reason I even have a new iPhone is because AT&T dropped support for my old one.
There are corner cases that cause annoyance, and those corner cases are indeed around where Apple is adding on top of Bluetooth: The ability to instantly switch the connected device without needing to disconnect from a previous device, and the ability to pair just by having the devices close. Those features are replicated in the Android ecosystem but are not standard.
If those two features are what you mean by "sucks" then fine. But that doesn't imply that Bluetooth doesnt work reliably, just that it doesn't have these two features broadly supported.
A difference here is that fast pairing and device switching on Android, while not a standard part of the protocol, is open for device manufacturers to support, unlike Apple's versions of these features.
Probably doesn't happen for everyone, otherwise it'd be fixed. But that's how it always is with overly complicated stuff, edge cases everywhere.
My AirPods frequently hop between my MacBook and iPhone without asking though, because the other device played a split second audio clip.
Strong YMMV I guess.
Earphone quality drops to something awful whenever the mic is in use. That's just cause of the BT standard. This gets more complicated with multiple devices involved.
I'll be listening to music on my work laptop with my headphones, my iPhone will get a call, it'll switch to the iPhone only to play a ringtone in my ears, then when I accept the call the iPhone will switch back to its own earpiece instead of my headphones. Juked!
Then some unpredictable things. Like it gets stuck connected to the wrong device, or it starts playing music when I turn them on, or it won't connect even with a device it should remember. I've had my BT headphones connect during a meeting, make my laptop start playing random music, then disconnect, causing the laptop to switch to full volume speakers and blast music into my meeting.
I don't fault Bose for any of this. These are the most reliable BT headphones I've ever owned. The standard just sucks. The iPhone side has issues like randomly switching to my car BT when I walk by wearing my headphones. The car BT can only pair to 1 device at a time, so my wife or I have to disable BT to free it up. Overall it's not worth vs just plugging in the darn cable.
I wonder if they are using a proprietary configuration API that is deliberately kept secret or if no Android devs have figured out how to reverse engineer it yet (seems very unlikely).
If the likely former, I'd like someone to address this as well as it almost feels like if they're getting into hearing assistance features, then accessibility becomes important.
That being said, they absolutely excel at noise cancellation, and that's because their core market is airmen, Bose is used almost universally by pilots for their in-flight headsets. It's where they make their actual money.
They don't have much of an engineering org anymore, they're just a marketing brand that white boxes contracted out designs.