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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that Apple is operating on the same scale, at least regarding physical presence.

Apple disallows disabling Bluetooth and WiFi easily because it allows them to track their air tags everywhere.

It's because people come up with all kinds of cargo cult things they think will increase their phone battery but don't actually matter or make it worse. Going into the app switcher and hand killing all apps is the other one.

They don’t “disallow” turning off Bluetooth easily. You can trivially do it via the settings app. The control panel pull down does it temporarily because that’s what most people want. 99.9% of people are turning off wifi because the wifi connection they currently have is acting up. So turning it back on tomorrow so the user doesn’t forget and ends up chewing through mobile data is the obvious best UX.

Nah, this is clearly a deliberate dark pattern from Apple. They could easily add a long-press option on the Bluetooth icon to fully disable it. But they don’t.

My solution is a Shortcut to disable Bluetooth, triggered by a widget on my Home Screen. It’s annoying that I need to allocate space for that, but at least I can (actually) toggle Bluetooth without opening Settings.

Clearly.

Except that every single iOS update, including today's iOS 17.5, silently re-enables Bluetooth even after you specifically disable it in the Settings app.

FB9992639 "Thank you for filing this feedback report. We reviewed your report and determined the behavior you experienced is currently functioning as intended."

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