Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/10/tech/bluetooth-technology-headache/index.html

by cpeterso • 4 years ago

633 575 4 years ago

baybal2• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is governed way better than any other comm standard. For example, WiFi implementation incompatibilities are legendary, and solving them is left to device makers instead of a specialist body. Certification is also non-existant.

For Bluetooth, at least for a major vendor, it's unthinkable that they wouldn't be able to come to Bluetooth SIG, and call out the issue, and have it worked on until it's solved. But more usual, issue will be highlighted at the certification, and test stage.

ptx• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is said to borrow its name from [...] Early programmers adopted "Bluetooth" as a code name for their wireless tech [...]

Maybe the author should have at least glanced at Wikipedia to find out by whom this "is said" and who these "early programmers" are.

moomin• 4 years ago

Honestly, I constantly criticize journalists for not going any deeper than Wikipedia, but this author is staying well out of even the shallow end of the pool.

ChuckNorris894• 4 years ago

People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon.

I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer ringtones and wallpapers to that phone from my Windows XP PC, or to and from other kids' phones and it always worked.

Maybe I was really lucky, but for all its apparent faults Bluetooth has always served me well and I personally can't really fault it for its intended purpose.

As former SDR developer who dived into Bluetooth firmware at some point, I can only attribute the connectivity issues some Bluetooth devices have to just poor firmware design with insuficient testing, or most commonly, bad antenna design with insufficient real world testing from the device manufacturer (experienced RF graybeard engineers are expensive $$$, and most HW companies are sweatshops who pay their engineers peanuts, so there's the main problem that leads to the infamous Bluetooth connectivity issues IMHO), and not to issues with Bluetooth tech itself, fact confirmed after lengthy discussions with our HW guru in the lab. From my experience Sony, Bose and Panasonic put great thought into antenna design while Samsung and LG can be pretty hit or miss. I have not looked into Apple's though, so I can't say, but from the rest of their HW design and the talent they usually have in the HW department, I can assume it's top notch as well.

The 2.4GHz spectrum is way more crowded today than it was in 1999 when the first Bluetooth version came out, so getting uninterrupted real-time audio streams reliably on it is hard, but not impossible.

One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers and worse, gives developers too much freedom in implementation, meaning your widget might not play well with another widget because each took their allowed freedom in different directions, though Bluetooth chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this regard, provided you also do a good job on your antenna design.

Groxx4• 4 years ago

I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality, but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere, and battery life is amazing, I love bluetooth for HID.

Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 laptops (2 windows and 2 macs, both pairs ~3-4 years apart age wise) while trying to pick one, and NONE of the headsets connected to every laptop without issues. EVERY headset had periodic audio drops at least after a couple minutes with at least 2 machines, if not all 4, and many had much more severe issues (disconnects, disconnects that wouldn't reconnect, not connecting at all, etc).

^ All of those headsets connected fine to two different phones, and used the codecs I'd expect... usually anyway. Good enough for the most part, and only 2 had periodic audio drops.

Since you seem to know the field somewhat, what the heck is going on with computer bluetooth audio stacks? Are phones just buying all the good chips and bluetooth-OS-integrating-engineers?

vladvasiliu3• 4 years ago

That's weird. I've had pretty much the reverse experience. My Sony and Shure headphones have always worked perfectly (even on Linux!), but I've had issues with a keyboard and mouse not reconnecting after they went to sleep (computer stayed fully on), or at least taking forever.

However, I was surprised by how little lag the mouse had compared to its regular wireless (Logitech unifying).

shakna3• 4 years ago

One thing I can fault the Bluetooth SIG is that the spec is very complex and full of optional bits which could lead to many pitfalls for the uninitiated engineers, though Bluetooth chips from reputable manufacturers who know what they're doing, like CSR, TI, SiLabs and Nordic are nearly bulletproof in this regard.

Earlier spec versions aren't just incredibly complex - they're contradictory.

That's what led to so many manufacturers doing their own thing in very slightly incompatible ways. You can pick up two certified bluetooth devices and find them to have different behaviour in the exact same circumstances. In fact, some of the best devices are ones that aren't certified, because they ignore the spec and act more reasonable than it demands.

Apple famously skips several of the mandatory verification handshakes to reduce latency in their AirPods. Not optional, mandatory. Because the spec doesn't work that well in the real world.

dhsysusbsjsi• 4 years ago

Yet every month my Apple AirPods stop connecting with my Apple iPhone, until I hard reboot the iPhone. And a $70 Bluetooth headset that wouldn’t connect to a brand new Apple laptop until I restarted it 4 times, rebooted the Mac twice, and toggled the pairing mode about 8 times. And Bose headsets that don’t connect to iPhone for 2-3 attempts.

ChuckNorris894• 4 years ago

That sounds more like an Apple Bluetooth stack issue at their OS level rather than something wrong with the Bluetooth chip/tech itself. It's where you should complain to Apple or ask for refunds/replacements.

Granted, Apple is not alone here since both Google and Microsoft really botched their Bluetooth stacks on their OSs. Especially Google who hasn't learned you can't treat your C driver/embedded SW like front-end JS code.

matsemann• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder if it's almost deliberate incompetence on Apple's side, to make it seem even more lucrative to buy everything from them. My GF and I sometimes switch/borrow each other earphones and other gear, and she has loads of problems connecting to her Mac or iPhone. Like the Sony MX3000 something she has to reconnect every half an hour or they will be out of sync with the show she's watching on her laptop by a second or so. But for me never issues like that on Android/Dell.

neurostimulant3• 4 years ago

This is one of the reason why I prefer to use a usb-c bluetooth audio dongle to use my bluetooth headphones. I have multiple bluetooth headphones and multiple devices that can use them, so switching the headphones between those devices got old very quickly. Now I just plug the bluetooth audio dongle to the device I currently use (pc, laptop, or phone) and turn on the bluetooth headphone I want to use, and it's done. I basically turned the bluetooth headphones into a virtually wired headphones now.

rektide• 4 years ago

I have over a dozen Bluetooth audio devices & near no complaints. across my various personal & work laptops & phones, everything works reliably & great. some of my oldest headsets have some dropouts while exercising and that's about it. it's very confusing reading anti-bluetooth articles & posts. i don't feel like we're using the same technologies.

gfrff2• 4 years ago

My $400 Bose headphones have worse range than my cheap MPow headphones. Perhaps whatever great thought Bose puts in doesn't result in great products....

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

Or the improved sound quality comes at a cost?

neurostimulant3• 4 years ago

Using a bluetooth audio dongle can significantly extends the range. My Bose would starts stuttering at ~4m range, but after using a bluetooth audio dongle, it basically cover the whole house now (>10m radius).

ranger_danger2• 4 years ago

Your experience is NOT typical. I have had random connectivity issues with every single Bluetooth device I have ever used.

My biggest complaint is bluetooth gamepads. They simply never work right for me... always registering phantom presses or just none at all. I always have to hold it above my head for it to work right which is unusable.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 4 years ago

Xbox one wireless gamepad and ps4/5 gamepads are the most used out there and they seem to work fine, but I suspect these might not be using Bluetooth when connected to a console

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

the spec is very complex

I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime).

I had a stack of 3-inch (large) 3-ring binders on my desk, reaching 2ft high (0.6m).

It was well over 2,000 pages. It would have been five times that, if I had printed out the various profiles, and whatnot.

BT is crazy. The difference between "Classic" and BLE is frustrating.

I suspect that soon, all BT devices will be cribbing from the BLE playbook. It is a lot more usable than BR/EDR, but the data rate sucks. I think that changes to that, are on the horizon.

DavidPeiffer• 4 years ago

I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime).

I've never dealt with Bluetooth myself, but once heard/read that a company could follow that spec perfectly and their device wouldn't work with large swaths of devices. The claim was that companies implement something that's Bluetooth adjacent but there are some non-conformances that everybody "just does" to make it work the majority of the time.

I'm curious if your (and others) experience align with this?

amelius4• 4 years ago

The litmus test: can you and a friend listen to a single music stream with two BT headphones at the same time?

sp3322• 4 years ago

Bluetooth barely has the bandwidth for stereo audio to begin with. Doubling it up means ok-ish mono audio for each of you, or really crummy stereo.

google234123• 4 years ago

I'm still annoyed that most bluetooth headphones haven't figured out how to provide stereo sound at the same time as using the microphone. There is definitely enough bandwidth in bluetooth 5

LinAGKar• 4 years ago

I hope LE audio will fix that

out_of_protocol• 4 years ago

By the way, what LE stands for? Legendary Edition?

izacus• 4 years ago

I tried really hard but I couldn't find any new spec for two way audio. It seems that the specification authority is completely ignoring that problem.

dogma1138• 4 years ago

Most do but many can also go into a “headset” mode in which they use encoding that is more suitable for speech. That said this is mainly an issue for Windows these days that does that automatically for some reason nothing stops you from switching to headphones and still using the mic.

In fact for voice and streaming apps that aren’t classified as telco apps it doesn’t even switch.

kmarc3• 4 years ago

worksforme on Linux, MacOS and Android. I have a Bose QC35 and it just works, now for years, reliably.

On Linux, it used to work quite okayish with pulseaudio, even automatic switching between profiles, when an application requested microphone. Since pipewire came around, much higher quality.

hjanssen• 4 years ago

It works, but the quality is noticeably reduced. Gaming (and using VoIP in e.g. CSGO) on this profile is practically unusable, the quality of sound is so diminished that it is very annoying.

zwirbl3• 4 years ago

That's because there is no profile for that, as per the spec the hands free profile only supports Mono

This changes with LE Audio (spec released in March iirc) which is much more channel oriented (e.g. 2 channels stereo playback + 2 more stereo microphone), has a new codec (LC3) and has support in the upcoming android release

znpy• 4 years ago

Nice, maybe in 15 years I’ll be able to use that in debian.

sgt2• 4 years ago

My AirPods Pro are likely the only Bluetooth device I've seen that's not only easy to pair but also works every time without fail. The other day they actually did fail though, but that was because of massive interference of 2.4GHz that made nothing work. Can't really blame Bluetooth for that.

bluescrn2• 4 years ago

Good hardware ruined by non-replaceable batteries

sgt2• 4 years ago

Lithium-ion, should last a long time

MattPalmer10862• 4 years ago

I do find it a frustrating technology. As the article says, pairing can be quite hit and miss.

I generally have to search how to pair devices when I have to set it up on a new device, even for devices I've had for years! They're all different, and it can be unreliable.

I have read that it suffers the interoperability issues because the spec is complex with many optional bits in it, although I don't know how true that is.

tgv• 4 years ago

I only have problems on a (cheap-ish) Android tablet. It often keeps asking "pair?" until you go into the settings and pair there, except directly after booting. I have the feeling it's not so much "the technology", but rather bad chips, lousy drivers and a 'lacking' integration in the OS.

MattPalmer10862• 4 years ago

I have had problems with premium devices too. I have a speaker that will connect to my pixel phone but not to an iOS device. It wasn't a particularly cheap speaker, although not premium.

Ok, so that's a problem with the speaker Bluetooth, not the premium devices, in all likelihood.

But after so many years I'd expect even low quality devices to Just Work™ for basic things like audio.

faeriechangling• 4 years ago

Pairing is my main issue with the technology as I’m frequently using one device across multiple devices. The ideal for me would be latency free crystal clear audio that can fuse maybe four different simultaneous input streams, but since that’s likely impossible, I would just like to spend less time in the hell of trying to force my headphones to stop autopairing to the wrong device every time it turns on.

Nobody offers bug free Bluetooth - nobody.

bgribble• 4 years ago

Not bug-free, but I have used the Jabra Elite earbuds for a while now (75t and 85t) and they manage multiple-device connections pretty well. Up to 3 (I think) devices can be connected to the buds at the same time.

meltyness2• 4 years ago

I hadn't thought about it, but yeah this headline captures it for sure.

The music / voice / connect construct of the spec seems to have improved this in the past few years so that it's possible in software to connect.

I downgraded from a flagship to a dirtpile phone, and now when I turn off Bluetooth from the Android Quick Settings, it turns itself back on exactly once, every. single. time.

Sending interactions is pretty reliable too for switching between devices. Pressing the call button on my car or my headphones signals my phone to instantly change audio contexts, but it's inconsistent, and some devices send "pause" signals at will.

It's probably an accident, but my car displays correct, up-to-date, scrubbing and metadata, and I can get audio from my ANC headphones at the same time.

Bottom line, I've seen the "Connect" button work, and there was even a Quick Settings panel listing paired devices for you to plug/unplug at your pleasure, but only if you've paid for an expensive phone.

pondidum• 4 years ago

I've not had problems with bluetooth for years.

Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?

klodolph• 4 years ago

Buy better printers, or change your expectations. I haven’t had problems with printers as long as I can remember, except a problem with large spool files created by PowerPoint.

I used to work as a technician running computer labs. This job extended to printer repair. I later wrote software to manage printers. Some printers are really very nice to work with and not too hard to repair. Some laser printers are built like tanks and give you glorious crisp text forever. Some inkjets produce vivid or subtle colors with fantastic durability and consistency (assuming you use decent paper). Some people have unrealistic expectations about what a cheapo inkjet can do, or unrealistic expectations about what kind of paper you can use, and some people just buy the wrong model.

kmarc3• 4 years ago

I bought a HP printer (scanner/fax/copier) 10ish years ago and since then I don't have printing problems. Before HP I thought the same as you :-)

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

Almost every printer sold in the last decade supports IPP Everywhere, which has robust support on Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, ChromeOS, Android, and anything that can run CUPS. It's completely driverless, too.

kristopolous3• 4 years ago

And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any option for choosing otherwise

Now they'll claim you can specify it a variety of ways such as picking the document type, but they'll just ignore you. I forget all the permutations but I tried them all.

I've had to reverse engineer their windows program from pcap files to get the real protocol

I've spent a good deal of time in cups supporting these systems. Reminds me that I'll need to convince cups to take my fixes somehow (which first requires me to convince them this is real; not as easy as you think because there's lots of hardware variance - you can't just reproduce random printer X and then I have to convince them that the XML documentation of claimed support is either incorrect or useless; then I'll have to convince them that SNMP is the way to go, then and only then, if I walk that tightrope can I put forth my solution ; gotta love the ceremony).

oynqr2• 4 years ago

They might support it, but few actually run the validation suite for IPP Everywhere. My Epson printer ignores specified orientations and shits itself when you specify print quality. Another certified HP printer of mine does just fine.

bjoli• 4 years ago

I buy stupid printers with good cups support and plug them into a printer server. It has been robust for about 7 years, and I have only had to update the raspberry pi once to a new LTS release.

OTOH I am the kind of guy that only buys wired headphones.

mrweasel• 4 years ago

The only Bluetooth issues I’v had are weird ones. Apparently I’m to tall for Bluetooth, at least the cheap headphones I bought. Place the phone in my left hand pocket and the headphones, which have the antenna on the right can barely pickup the signal.

The there’s the implementation, and I cannot figure out how they messed up this one: Concept2 have an iOS app for their rowing machines. The previous version would pair the second you asked the rowing machine to connect. The new versions three to five times slower. It’s the same bluetooth stack, why would pairing change?

donatj• 4 years ago

I have a pair of Anker Bluetooth ear buds I really like. Fit nice, decent noise canceling.

They are just a fricken nightmare to sync. It took me half an hour of fiddling with them to get both of them to sync at the same time to my phone when I bought them.

My wife's headphones died and without asking she borrowed them. She messed with them and was unable to get them to sync to her phone.

Since then I have now been unable to get them both to connect to my phone reliably at the same time. It's been a couple months.

All that said, that’s the only real Bluetooth device that's given me more than 30 seconds trouble in recent years.

johnwalkr• 4 years ago

I have a cheap but good bluetooth headsetthat I like. Sometimes I have trouble using it because it connects to a device I don't actually want to use first. If I made a headset I would put a switch for multiple devices on it, like some mouses have.

Anyway it has a nice feature: long press the pair button to forget all pairings. It solves almost any issue, and it's more convenient to re-pair things that you want to use, than switch to a device you are not using to disconnect

vxNsr• 4 years ago

It was for this reason that I settled on AirPods. I tried nearly every single wireless earbud available at every price point, from free to $250 and none worked as well as the AirPods when it came to connecting reliably every time. I tested a whole bunch of relatively expensive earbuds for a week, some were a pain to connect from the get go, and never got better, others worked the first time but then got annoying after that. AirPods we’re great, since then I’ve had the occasional hiccup, but it’s like at most once a month and I use them multiple times a day.

MrDresden• 4 years ago

There is nothing in this article actually answering the question posed in the title.

Unless the answer is this paraphrasing "No clear agreement on how it should function was ever reached".

turtleman1338• 4 years ago

Bad audio quality with bluetooth on phones is mostly a myth. Todays smartphones only have cheap digital audio converters(DAC), so that you usually get higher quality music with a proper bluetooth codec like aptx.

Paul_S3• 4 years ago

Bluetooth poor audio quality is not a myth. The bandwidth is just not there for high quality audio. Even with aptx. That's why companies roll their own with BLE and the 2M phy. And even with that it's still flaky because it's wireless and can and will drop packets.

Yes, BLE audio is an improvement but those devices are still in the future. What you have currently, you're better off using your smartphone DAC.

aki237• 4 years ago

But... Does the quality of a phone's DAC matter? I was under the impression that Bluetooth is digital audio. And the quality issue is with the bandwidth mostly or the headset DAC sucks.

somat• 4 years ago

Correct, the point was that the phones dac only matters when using the phones built in speaker, if you are using a blutooth audio device, then what matters for sound quality is the dac in the bluetooth device.

goldcd• 4 years ago

I think codecs are where I have most of my remaining BT annoyances. AptX is great (but there's also AptX HD, AptX.. is it variable? etc) - and exactly which AptX is supported varies by the Qualcomm chip in your phone and the device you're connecting it to. Or you can go with Sony's LDAC. Works great on my Pixel, once I've turned on "quality" in the Sony App, then turned on the LDAC opton that gives in my bluetooth settings (and optionally can go into the dev menu each time I connect, to adjust the bitrate).

I do like bluetooth - but working out what features will work with which devices is a PITA. It always falls back to something functional, but fallback masks a lot of improvements that could be made. Although maybe that's the right approach. It works, and if you're somebody who likes to fiddle, you can.

astrange• 4 years ago

Recently phones don't have DACs since they don't have headphone jacks. Well, they have them for the speakers and vibration but presumably you didn't mean that.

But their dongles' DACs are quite sufficient and are better than most of the audiophile DAC industry (which doesn't have the budget to actually make anything good).

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

m12k• 4 years ago

I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?

Paul_S3• 4 years ago

You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other but normally that's not the case.

byteflip2• 4 years ago

100%. Interoperability is the complexity. You’ll find old popular devices for example that are slightly different in behavior to the “norm”. It could be straight up incorrect behavior or maybe something more subtle. Do you drop support for those devices or change your behavior dynamically based on the device? Would your customers complain if you did drop it? Can you identify the device reliably? What if they update their software/behavior in the future - would your workaround break? Does your BT software stack even give you enough control to do fix it? Does your hardware/software vendor give you enough support to fix things if you can’t do it yourself? How many other devices did you test against?

It was painful but fun to work on.

shakna3• 4 years ago

I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified

Absolute opposite. The blutetooth spec is one of the most hideous, largest specs you have ever laid eyes on. The full spec, very heavy, very particular, is in excess of a thousand pages.

If you "just implement the spec", you have an enormous team and budget. But, you'll still end up in a hole, because not everyone agrees with what the spec is actually saying, because it's too complicated, and too large. So there are parts which are in direct competition with each other, leaving you to have to guess an answer - knowing that there is no market agreement for what is the "right" answer.

ChildOfChaos• 4 years ago

The annoying thing I have with bluetooth, is with my headphones, I connect them up, set them as the sound source and just..... nothing.

I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too and although that is not playing any sound at all, somehow has priority and doesn't allow any sound to be played by any other device.

vladvasiliu3• 4 years ago

This annoys me to no end, too, but I'd say the issue isn't as much Bluetooth itself as the implementation of multiple sources on the headphones.

I have the exact same issue with a pair of Jabra headphones that have multiple wired inputs. They'll switch between them for frivolous reasons.

enriquto• 4 years ago

I have to go round all of my devices and disable the bluetooth on them, because some other device is connected too

Sigh. If only there was some kind of mechanism to indicate physically which of the devices you want the sound to come from. A thin string of sorts, that you could attach easily to both devices to indicate that these two are to be connected. But we can only dream...

criddell3• 4 years ago

As long as you don't have to keep the string connected to use the device after pairing, I think that's a good idea.

diogenescynic• 4 years ago

This is my biggest issue. I use my AirPods to connect to my two laptops, tv, Bose portable speaker, iPad, and iPhone and sometimes have to spend several minutes disabling devices to actually connect to the device I want.

Worse, when I’m connected to one device like a laptop but I get a call that I want to answer on my iPhone, it’s nearly impossible to actually transfer or reconnect the AirPods to the iPhone.

I tried to get two pairs of AirPods to resolve this and keep one connected/dedicated to my iPhone, but even that doesn’t work because once you’re logged in with your Apple ID it will keep re-syncing to your other Bluetooth devices. It’s insanity.

wildrhythms4• 4 years ago

Same issue. I find Apple devices are the most aggressive to try to pair themselves, even when the devices are in sleep mode! Most of the time I just relegate myself to holding the pair button on the headphones and re-pairing from scratch.

neurostimulant3• 4 years ago

One option is to use your bluetooth headphone exclusively with a usb bluetooth audio dongle (which is detected as a usb headphone when you plug it). Unpair the headphone from all your devices, and plug the bluetooth audio dongle to the device you want to use the headphone with. This is faster than scrambling to find whichever device currently grab your headphone and disable it.

zardo• 4 years ago

The worst is when it connects to my laptop with the lid shut and not logged in.

SAI_Peregrinus2• 4 years ago

That's one of the core annoyances of Bluetooth: it's 1:1, not many:many.

I've got a desktop, a laptop, and a phone. I've got a Bluetooth earbuds (with microphone) and a Bluetooth speaker (no mic).

So obviously it should be simple to play audio from any of those devices to both the earbuds and the speaker at the same time. With wired headphones & speakers, that took a $2 splitter. But with Bluetooth, at best you can get one application per output.

It'd be really nice if you could play audio from multiple sources to the different speakers at the same time. But that can't be done. You have to disconnect from one device, connect to the other, each time. I've never even seen a Bluetooth mixer (not a wired mixer that can use Bluetooth, but a device that can manage multiple Bluetooth connections for different audio streams at once).

The same stuff all applies to Bluetooth microphones.

Bluetooth needs many:many audio streams to get parity with wired sound.

trollied• 4 years ago

There's some good stuff in the pipeline for Bluetooth. Auracast: https://www.bluetooth.com/auracast/ - this is essentially a localized broadcast bluetooth stream, and has loads of brilliant use-cases (think: commentary at a sporting event).

yieldcrv• 4 years ago

My experience has been pretty good on cars after 2015 when using iphone

Cars Speakers And other apple products

Unusually awesome

iso1631• 4 years ago

My carplay experience when I plug my phone in via USB is great

When I try to use bluetooth, forget it, works about half the time, massive pain having to pair with each new car, etc

nine_k• 4 years ago

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer.

My take from comments here and my experience:

- Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB.

- Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-standard features. They "save" on writing a good driver. They care little if devices made by their competition don't work reliably or at all in the mix. (And even sometimes their own!)

- RF noise makes radio interfaces like BT inherently not always reliable. But the user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby, for the user it's just "damn bluetooth glitches for no reason at all".

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

They do agree on an awful lot of stuff, but the tools provided by the Bluetooth guys aged very poorly (i.e. their tools for generating GATT interfaces as C code is absolute garbage, full of holes and has a built-in buffer overflow capability).

The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE. Most of us working in this space have some cack-handed way to advertise data without connecting because (for example) most of the connections to Bluetooth LE devices involve you having to do device discovery, even if you are connecting to 500 of the same damn device.

Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced, the Bluetooth chips in most cheap phones are also rubbish and fail when you exceed their undocumented number of connections, often requiring a reboot of the device etc.

In short: You can sheet a lot of the problems back to an ill thought out spec and bluetooth chips in things like phones that just plain suck.

Things like RF interference - I just don't know. Sometimes there is just a heap more bluetooth traffic around than anybody knows about. Packet sniffers are relatively cheap, it's interesting to fire one up in a busy office and see how many bluetooth packet collisions there are (hint: it's a lot). Blame RF storms or whatever but it's more likely to be something advertising a lot and spamming the spectrum.

toxik3• 4 years ago

Something I’ve noticed is that Bluetooth breaks down around major construction sites, like infrastructure projects. It’s very strange, I wonder if they have some kind of high power BT transmitters for some reason.

seanalltogether• 4 years ago

The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth LE.

Yeah, I've been working with BLE now for clients for 3 years, it seems like most people think of their devices as little CRUD servers (unless you're doing genuine pairing with constant data streams). BLE would be much better using a simple REST model than the GATT table model.

Also, the bluetooth library in Android started out terrible and didn't improve despite being replaced

One thing I'll give Apple credit for is having a very solid bluetooth stack. We've had only a handful of BLE connection failures on our testers apples devices over the past 3 years, whereas on android test devices we get at least one connection failure DAILY that interrupts test cases from running. Furthermore Android devices just reach a point of critical failure where you need to just restart the device to resume BLE.

chasil• 4 years ago

Bluetooth devices will "frequency hop" in a schedule to which they both agree. Noisy frequencies that result in lost data will be removed from their scheduled shifts.

There are only a maximum of 79 channels switched 1600/second, and if there is more noise than not, then the data rate will suffer, although updated modulation standards might compensate, if implemented.

jacquesm• 4 years ago

It's like phone chargers before USB.

No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

grnmamba2• 4 years ago

Everyone except Apple was already on USB.

And even in the pre-smartphone days, phone chargers always worked reliably. Phone charging is and was the complete opposite of what bluetooth is today.

Certhas• 4 years ago

That was my first association as well. This seems like a much much harder thing to regulate though...

For USB chargers industry had come up with a good solution but market failure meant there was no incentive to adopt it. That's text book regulation stuff. Here there doesn't seem to be a good proven solution out there that you could mandate...

moonchrome• 4 years ago

No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

When did this happen ?

tekknik3• 4 years ago

I for one will be very happy when the EU forces my US iPhone to drop lightning.

Bouncingsoul1• 4 years ago

/Opinion: "Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc)." => I think it is not the creators of the devices (peripherals), it is in my expierence the SmartPhones (Apple/Google) => iOS won't let you discover BLE Devices which have only generic or costum services/characteristics => iOS will hide parts of advertisment/discovery data from app developers => iOS won't let you know if a device is bonded/paired via API => on iOS if you want to initiate bonding, you have to initiate it from the peripheral => Android sometimes "forgets" keys of paired devices => Android sometimes scrambles data from characteristic notify() => Android sometimes "misses" characteristic writes (ratio 1:1000000) This is just what I could come up with in a minute. I develop both FW for peripherals and Apps, so my 2 cents => It's almost never the peripheral/fw and most time the Smartphone => RF noise is (almost) never an issue, glitchses come from phones

tekknik3• 4 years ago

Why is this written with slashes and fat arrows?

yosito• 4 years ago

user never notices when a small EM storm rages nearby

What's the easiest way to detect this? Is this something an average smartphone can detect with the right app? Or would I need to buy specific hardware to detect it?

anon_123g987• 4 years ago

We just learned that any Bluetooth device can detect it easily.

nothis• 4 years ago

Trying to understand bluetooth's awfulness is a dead-end. I tried. I thought, "yea, you're nerdy enough to read the tech specs, it will be boring but after an hour you'll understand and your bluetooth keyboard will pair every time instead of 85% of times". Nope.

fullstop3• 4 years ago

Also, head units generally don't get updates and the lifespan of a car is quite long. The phones that we are using now didn't always exist when the head unit was made.

makeitdouble3• 4 years ago

BT device makers are also coming in a slightly less explored field and have to make UX decisions that might not have clear answers yet.

For instance some BT headset have only a few buttons, and the play/pause button does also redial the last connected phone number depending on the phone’s state. I’m sure someone thought this feature made a ton of sense and really helps them in their day to day life, while I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

I’d expect it takes us a few more years to come to a consensus on how to cleanly solve this kind of diverging views.

westmeal• 4 years ago

Config files/settings.

CipherThrowaway• 4 years ago

I'll add that the specs are so bad that it's not commercially viable to try to fully understand them before building and launching BT products and middleware.

snarf21• 4 years ago

Most of it is the Bluetooth SIGs fault. It has got away from them. It reminds me of SMTP or HTTP, it is so useful that people couldn't wait for things and just implemented and added whatever they wanted. No certification is required just a registration for the logo so it has made it the wild wild west. Additionally being stuck in the "free" frequencies means that it has no ability to deliver quality in a noisy room.

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

The specs (there are multiple) are enormous and you honestly have zero hope of fully implementing one from scratch. It's thousands and thousands of pages covering everything from the physical layer all the way up to deep application-layer integration. Manufacturers rely on support libraries and hardware that does most of the work, and until only the last few years most of those on the whole have been total garbage (again because the specs are so massive it just costs too much time and effort to implement them). I don't expect anything less than a team of 10 people all with a mix of senior hardware and software/firmware experience could fully implement bluetooth & bluetooth LE from scratch in less than a year.

anotherhue• 4 years ago

I get far fewer problems if I make sure there's a 1:1 pairing between devices.

Headphones playing from your phone and your mac in a back pack? The mac will wake up every few minutes and steal the connection.

Paul_S3• 4 years ago

Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.

qikInNdOutReply• 4 years ago

Just turn on the emotors and watch all those connections scramble.

badthingfactory• 4 years ago

Any time a relative asks me which printer they should buy, I tell them to get the cheapest Brother laser printer they can find without wifi. I mostly do this to save myself support calls, but it's also the printer I use in my own house.

infinityplus1• 4 years ago

Brother printers have regressed as well. See this post: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

oblio2• 4 years ago

I bought a wireless HP printer.

Besides the fact that I never printed anything from my phone.

It literally required reinstallation (not restart!) to print again, every time, on Windows.

It needed an HP account to be able to scan. Locally.

I just chucked it out and got a USB Brother.

noisy_boy• 4 years ago

I have the wifi laser printer from Brother - works fine wirelessly with Ubuntu.

wingworks• 4 years ago

A few years ago this is what I did. Got the cheapest Brother laser printer. Happened to have wifi, but managed to disable it. It's been working solid via cables for years.

wikfwikf• 4 years ago

I bought the cheapest Brother laser printer in the early 2010s because someone on a forum gave me this same advice. It has worked without issue ever since.

A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has also worked almost without problems (the exception being it had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at all and it has never gone wrong.

rootusrootus5• 4 years ago

I kinda did this. Cheapest Brother printer, but with WiFi. Which is exclusively how we use it. Been flawless, printing from windows laptops, macbooks, iphones...

m4632• 4 years ago

I have one and connected via USB. Works well.

bergenty• 4 years ago

That’s too much trouble. I like being able to print from any laptop, my phones or iPad.

NikolaNovak12• 4 years ago

Sadly, apple started a 3.5mm free future and others were happy to jump on that horrible wagon (as well as soapbar sexy designs which you cannot hold without a case, but that's another lovable rant :).

But yeah. My computers have Ethernet whenever they can. That alone saves what little hair I have left.

askvictor2• 4 years ago

Maybe Apple had a sinister plan here... First, they make all of their own Apple gear's bluetooth work really well with other Apple gear (which they generally do). Then get rid of the cables, and everyone else will copy Apple because that seems to be what other companies do. But everyone else's bluetooth implementations suck (which they generally do), so people think that Android/Samsung/etc aren't as good as Apple which Just Works(TM), thus slowly exacting their revenge on the copycats and/or steering more sales towards Apple.

fennecfoxen• 4 years ago

I worked on a wireless network management product for ~5 years, integrating with multiple vendors, and I'm putting fiber in my walls later this year

xen2xen12• 4 years ago

"If you can get a wired, use a wire.." Tech support advice I've given for at least a decade. It's amazing how often people end up being concerts to my way of thinking after a little bit. Wires don't have interference, they don't randomly not work (or much less, I have seen that). They have way more individual bandwidth. They are better in every way.

unethical_ban• 4 years ago

I thought android auto was going to be cool. I've gotten to use it with my flagship phones and several late model rentals. Every single time, it will disconnect upon occasion while driving (and using nav) forcing me to unplug replug. I haven't waited long enough to see if it could recover ina minute or so.

When I enable it by plugging my phone into the car, it tells me it is going to enable Bluetooth.

That is like getting high speed internet only to have the modem do dialup.

Does anyone know why a forced wired protocol requires substandard wireless connectivity?

andy_ppp• 4 years ago

I’m building something that uses Bluetooth and largely for the classes of device I’m using everything seems to work fine? Isn’t all this like everything, largely Apple and premium devices work well and cheap crappy stuff barely works? Sort of implies it’s not necessarily the the standard at fault…

tobyhinloopen• 4 years ago

AirPods Pro still randomly fail to connect to my iDevices.

Other devices will randomly connect and disconnect to othet devices in my house, announcing the connect and disconnect every time even though the connection isn’t used

wildrhythms4• 4 years ago

I commute with the Bose Soundsport bluetooth headphones, which I actually like, but randomly they will announce that they've disconnected from this or that device, despite continuing to play audio and all of the other features with that device just fine.

numpad02• 4 years ago

It’s expensive stuff that gets finicky, because cheap devices are identical to one another in layers 2 and up.

guzik• 4 years ago

If I can add few cents to the discussion. Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology for us, because:

- There is no decent support on web so we need to rely on the mercy of Apple/iOS (RIP to Web Bluetooth API).

- Some Android devices don't work well with Bluetooth (e.g. Motorola, OnePlus). Data packages are gibberish, connectivity is lost on random occasions, etc.

And from customer perspective: device manufacturers can't agree which pairing strategy is best, so they are keep experimenting leading to massive confusion. That's frustrating.

danuker• 4 years ago

I dare you to try sending anything between an Apple device and ANY Android phone.

In my experience, the Android phones work between each other, and the iPhones work between each other, but I can't cross the Apple fence.

Something tells me this is on purpose.

salmonlogs• 4 years ago

One of the most frustrating problems I've encountered is arbitrary limits on the number of paired/remembered Bluetooth devices.

My Denon amplifier has an arbitrary limit of 8 paired devices. When you pair a 9th the oldest is forgotten. Storage is cheap, why have the limit!

gc22browsing• 4 years ago

The problem at the radio frequency level is simply that not only is the 2.4GHz ISM band crowded by microwave ovens, WiFi and lots of other devices, but that one end of a BT device is typically battery powered and transmitting at a tiny fraction of the power of the interfering devices. In a typical office or home the moment you turn on the microwave or WiFi device you are effectively jamming the BT signal. Frequency hopping can hop it all likes and try to pick the least worse band out of all even more over-powering ones.

Andrew_nenakhov• 4 years ago

Apple's "magical" continuity feature between devices (including Airdrop) is usually going crazy and works only 20% of the time if you are connected to the network with cable, not wifi, even if you are in the same subnet.

_zfxr• 4 years ago

My only real issue with bluetooth these days is that I cant disable certain MIDI CC events.

The same midi blob that sends vol +/- from my cars volume encoder, is used by applications to hijack phone volume to push notifications.

But it always resets to -inf once and there is no way for me to disable or modify midi cc behaviours globally or on a per application basis.

Someone give me discrete midi cc control via a third party app before i drive off a bridge. Its maddening.

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X:

The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is baked into my mind forever at this point.

As I want to set my plans in silence, I press stop on the dashboard. I set my Google Maps navigation, turn the knob to increase the volume so I could hear instructions, and this triggers "Songs of Innocence" to continue playing and the second burst of outrage in my cardiovascular system. I press the stop the second time, and at this point can continue on my journey - but should I try to increase the volume again, I have to remember the hugging men are always there.

Once (or twice), the phone just went berserk and couldn't stop playing them. I tried everything, but the Songs were playing, and the men were hugging while I was doing 70 mph on the motorway. I had to reboot the phone, but after the reboot, the car was unable to pair with it.

I don't know if it's a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

chaosite• 4 years ago

The image you're taking about is the cover art for that album, right?

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

Yes...

mort962• 4 years ago

It's album art for an album he never wanted though. Apple did a stunt some years back where they celebrated the launch of a new U2 album by automatically putting that album on everyone's iPhones. For many people, it's the only music they have in the stock Music app, so it's what gets played when nothing else is currently playing.

crb• 4 years ago

FWIW, the men are father and son; the lower man is U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

I don't know if it's for much better or much worse, but this allows me some freedom of thought now. Thank you, sir.

rjzzleep• 4 years ago

There used to be a link to remove the album[1] but it seems like they shut it down. So the only way for you to remove the album from your account is to contact apple support.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540#:~:text=Apple%2....

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

I also have an alarm set up I cannot delete. It says "pick up Matt from school." It migrated all the way from iPhone 7 to this X. But he has grown up since and I don't need to pick him up anymore. I'll include this in my request.

saiya-jin2• 4 years ago

what the hell did I just read... but yes Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is quite subpar compared to most peers, even though not sure if Lexus is 100% innocent here

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

If you consider Apples to be sub par. What’s your standard for decent?

I’ve never had any BT issues with Apple stuff. And most of the other things I own have terrible BT implementations. But maybe because I can’t tell how to check for a good implementation?

criddell3• 4 years ago

I think the blame has to lie with Lexus. My current phone is an iPhone and my previous phone was a Pixel and both work perfectly in my Subaru, although the head unit was replaced 3 times because it was triggering some type of SOS signal to Subaru.

Frankly, I've had fewer BT issues with my iPhone than I had with my Android phone, but the Android was from three years ago and I think things have probably improved since then.

iasay2• 4 years ago

It's definitely a Lexus problem. The BT connection on my Citroen is absolutely 100% flawless. Works every time reliably. But it's literally just a dumb audio and telephony connection. Anything more complicated than that is guaranteed to be absolutely a universally huge fucking shit show.

worthless-trash5• 4 years ago

Its funny as I have the toyota rav4 2021 hybrid, (toyota owns lexus) and have none of these problems. My money is on the shitty 'interpretation' of 'resume last song' between the car and the phone.

jwhite• 4 years ago

Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not the only one.

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

Amen, brother.

heavenlyblue• 4 years ago

I have exactly he same issue with U2 on Apple Music. Exactly the same song. I think it’s because you get it for free.

NikolaNovak12• 4 years ago

Haha, sorry, reminds me - my wife hates U2 with violent passion.

Eventually I asked her what caused such burning rage, and she said her car starts playing a specific U2 song every time she turns it on. For years!

Eventually I traced it to a promotional album U2 and apple and iTunes pushed to her devices without her knowledge.

Man can these things backfire!

But yeah we have a 2019 Honda and iPhones xr (not my choice; iPhone is work mandated) and there's just no telling what'll happen any given time when we start the car. Especially annoying since modern infotainment units make you wait 3 to 5 seconds to display crucial legal information before you can mute the darn thing. And let's not start if you have more than one Bluetooth headphone and more than one device at home :(

(Yes I'm now the grouch that misses 3.5mm on modern phones and uses my old Note 8 and wired Sennheiser to listen to music hassle free :D)

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

We should start a club!

My son just bought a 3.5 mm adapter for the phone. Turns out the younger generation prefers wired too.

jeffhuys• 4 years ago

There's an app by Apple that allows you to remove the U2 songs

omnibrain• 4 years ago

I feel you man...

The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) must be our most listened Song of all time.

bigie35• 4 years ago

Highly likely I'm misremembering, but a decade (at least) or so, there was an iTunes promo where Itunes literally pushed a free U2 album to everyone who had an iTunes account for free.

I specifically remember the internet hate that received at the time haha.

Here's a link: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/09/the-free-u2-album...

deelowe• 4 years ago

Same. Happened twice, really. Once on the ipod and then the iphone. Made U2 haters out of my wife and myself. I wonder how many people hate U2 music now because this.

shortsightedsid• 4 years ago

This....

I have exactly the same problem with the U2 album. In general, I like U2, but that album is a pain. It starts up every now and then in my car with carplay. Especially if I have my phone on with no app in the foreground when I plug it in.

Fire-Dragon-DoL4• 4 years ago

For what is worth, the same is for android. Whoever thought that changing volume should trigger "play" didn't actually test it.

I thought Audible was a virus, I can't shut it down or stop it and whatever I do, it starts playing

fuzzy2• 4 years ago

That’s not actually Android, or iOS. It’s the car audio system sending the Play command.

blackhaz7• 4 years ago

Oh, I am sure they did test it alright. With a Grinch smile.

holri• 4 years ago

Thank God that I have a car from 1981.

jefe_• 4 years ago

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happens occasionally since some Toyota update). The album art simply says: 'have a wonderful day.'

The song: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

jtbayly• 4 years ago

I created a one-hour long silent MP3 and named it similarly and added it to my phone. I've sent it to a friend who uses it as well.

focusedone• 4 years ago

Modern problems require modern solutions. Nice work.

dhimes• 4 years ago

My Toyota only plays my iPhone bluetooth if (a) my car is in bluetooth "mode" and not radio and (b) I have my music app open.

I've never experienced what you (two) describe. 2020 Toy and iPhone 11.

mcculley• 4 years ago

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

feet3• 4 years ago

But why the hell is it autoplaying in the first place? Does apple really hate their customers/users so much that they can't make this an option?

That's completely insane. The more I learn about apple, the more I see extremely hostile UI decisions for literally no reason

SilasX4• 4 years ago

Semi-related: I tried out Microsoft/Ford's SYNC system (voice commands for your car) in '08 and was upset that it didn't seem to support an option for "continue listening to podcast series X where I left off" ... like, the thing you would want to do all the time. (Item 5.)

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...

nostromo3• 4 years ago

I wonder how much this person makes in royalties for a silent track.

bakemawaytoys• 4 years ago

My car does this too! Except the first song in my library is A Christmas Festival by Boston Pops Orchestra.

The song has a dramatic opening, to say the least.

Lammy• 4 years ago

I use a jailbreak tweak for this: http://cydia.saurik.com/package/com.itortrix.stopplayin12/

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

Samir is brilliant. Talk about identifying a need and then solving it in the most efficient way possible.

funcDropShadow• 4 years ago

That is the best workaround for a software problem, I've ever heard.

void-pointer• 4 years ago

My dad added the song to the library, but it didn’t work, because he has a song called “A” [1] in his library and that one takes priority. It’s a family in-joke now.

[1] https://music.apple.com/gb/album/a/1316144097?i=1316144100

cphoover• 4 years ago

Same thing happens in my GFs Prius... So annoying we refer to it as an "aural assault". I can't help but think U2's release strategy was really negative publicity for them in the long run.

seer• 4 years ago

The general idea I think is that once you start the car, it just send a play command the moment it detects the connection.

And in theory it _can_ provide a really nice experience. For example I'm walking to my car listening to an audio book, the moment I start the car, BT is connecting to the phone and moves the audio playback from my AirPods to my car speaker without skipping a beat, its really impressive.

Additionally since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there, unless there was a book / podcast or even YouTube video playing before. Which is very often quite nice.

Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable, and why the automatic play is also not configurable is beyond me.

Just wanted to give my 2c how this can lead to a good XP.

Workaccount2• 4 years ago

My car (mazda 3) does this where it just sends the play command as soon as the phone (pixel) connects. But it just continues playing whatever I was last listening to, so it's always something different. Kinda nice.

ycombinete• 4 years ago

My fathers android does the same thing with YouTube music

meibo• 4 years ago

Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice

I think this should be obvious, they want you further into the ecosystem.

If every morning when you get into your car your iPhone starts playing Apple Music, you're more likely to switch to Apple Music for all of your listening than to get another phone.

CharlesW• 4 years ago

…since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there… […] Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable…

As you noted, it continues playing whatever you were playing in whatever app you were using, with no preference for Apple Music (I'm also a Music subscriber). If you were playing something with Spotify, that's what will continue to play.

I do wish it were configurable with contextual defaults. Too often, I start my car and my sleep sounds app continues to play "Airplane Interior".

makeitdouble3• 4 years ago

Doesn’t it also mean that whatever you were listening to yourself, and potentially stopped as you got company, is now playing in the speakers for everyone in the car just as you’re turning it the engine on and can also reach the stop button so fast?

GoToRO• 4 years ago

I also had similar problems with iPhone and BT. Before it worked very good with an Android. What I've learned over time is that apple seems ti sabotage anything that is not apple. I had connection problems with my car, with my Sony BT headphones, with portable speaker. Alk that went away as I switched back to android.

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

I guess you're right. My bluetooth experience is Macbook, iPhone, Apple keyboard, Apple mouse and Apple headphones. Everything works extremely well. The thing that I like most is power indicator integrated with iOS and macOS. Allows me to charge those things before they run out of power. As long as you stay in the garden, things are smooth.

rootusrootus5• 4 years ago

It is kinda funny, it was this behavior among others that made me switch from android to an iphone. I got so tired of BT shenanigans.

I do feel sympathy for the people still having trouble, but mine has been flawless. I do not, however, drive a Lexus.

ajdude2• 4 years ago

Similar happens in my Mazda. No matter what I do, unless the source was actively changed to something like the radio before I shut my car off, as soon as I turn on the ignition it starts force playing a random song on my iPhone , Usually at a painfully high volume. Apple has bloomed Mazda and Mazda have found Apple.

It always tends to be a race between the Bluetooth connection in my ability to turn the volume down before it plays; even when it’s stopped, the moment I take a phone call it starts playing at maximum volume again after ending the call.

themaninthedark3• 4 years ago

Not sure which version of the entertainment system you have but on my 2016 Mazda 3, it will try and play the last song you had playing on your phone. If it can't get the song to play it will then default to the other last audio device i.e. radio, XM, CD.

You should have separate volumes for music, navigation and hands-free in the entertainment system. Also, you can mute the sound using the volume knob while the warning text is displayed during key on.

My current solution is to make sure my CD player is the other last used device so that if the BT connection fails, I get sweet sweet Baroque music instead of FM blaring.

j3th9n• 4 years ago

I have an iPhone SE (1st gen) and a 50 dollar bluetooth enabled radio in my car. It works flawlessly every time, I turn on ignition, the radio connects with my phone and I can hit play. When I turn off ignition the current song is paused and the radio disconnects.

2-718-281-8282• 4 years ago

That's an iPhone problem. All our Androids (OnePlus, Google, Samsung, LG) have been connecting perfectly well to my TomTom navigator. Only my iPhone Xs refuses to connect. It's a well documented problem with iPhones and TomTom for many years. Similar story with my AirPods which won't connect to my Thinkpad running Linux - while all other BT headphones (Bose, Sony, Anker) do connect.

Also the article seems to primarily refer to Apple products.

corrral3• 4 years ago

My iPhone doesn't have these problems with my nearly-a-decade-old Honda Odyssey's BT stereo system. Neither does my wife's iPhone, nor the couple others we've owned while owning this van. That thing (the stereo / "smart" entertainment system) has got plenty of "how the shit did this pass QC?" quirks, but none relating to its interaction with my phone.

It's the car's fault.

Izkata• 4 years ago

It's possible it's neither:

but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

Back around 2010/2011, AT&T pushed a U2 album to Android phones in an OTA update as a system install, it couldn't be deleted.

jader201• 4 years ago

You’ve been able to delete the Music app for a while. If the U2 album is the first thing to play, it sounds like you may not use the Music app anyway.

Just delete it and problem solved (though agree with the general rage caused by this promotion).

klyrs• 4 years ago

My girlfriend's phone automatically resumes in the middle of a podcast. Same spot, same podcast, every time. I had no idea how lucky we are.

Loughla• 4 years ago

Right? I thought it was annoying that No Such Thing as a Fish kicked on into the exact same spot every time I went for a drive. But that's a million times better than anything by U2 or whatever Songs of Innocence is.

Nathanael_M• 4 years ago

James Keelaghan will take priority over U2. Ever time I step into my 2014 Hyundai Elantra I am greeted with Canadian folk music. Definitely a step up.

treeman79• 4 years ago

Would love if CarPlay would just work constantly. On my Ford remote start results in it not working 50% of the time. Regular start fails 10% of the time.

Solution is turn car off for 10 minutes or so. I assume some capacitor has to drain fully.

This is apparently just a known bug.

nucleardog2• 4 years ago

Not quite as bad, but my Subaru is similar. If I'm in the car with my phone when it turns on it connects immediately almost every time.

If I remote start the car and then go out to it it probably connects about 1/5 times. Another 1/5 I can go into the bluetooth settings and manually initiate the connection and it'll work. But a full 60% of the time I have to turn the entire car off and on again for the bluetooth to finally sort its shit out. Thankfully no 10 minute wait necessary.

LetsGetTechnicl• 4 years ago

I have a Honda and if I plug my iPhone into it's USB port it will auto-play the first song in my Apple Music/iTunes library which for a long time was "A-YO" by Lady Gaga. The opening lyric of "heeerreee we gooo" was amusing and appropriate for a while until it got incredibly annoying once I switched to Spotify.

I think the issue lies somewhere between Honda's implementation of the iPod standard and some weird backwards compatibility the iPhone is providing. When in this "iPod-like" mode I lost functionality like queuing songs via the Play Next option. It just disappeared from the long-press menu on songs.

Anyways I just bought a Bluetooth adapter from Amazon and plugged that into the aux input. Waaaay better

fullstop3• 4 years ago

You may enjoy this episode of Reply All: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/76hel39

duffyjp• 4 years ago

I thought your anecdote was satire until the very last word. That was a great ride.

FredPret• 4 years ago

That’s a hilarious writeup.

My car starts blasting the FM radio if I don’t plug my iPhone in. I have never and will never willingly listen to FM radio, and yet, Ford has decided that it must be played at full volume an uncertain interval after the car is started. It’s caused me enough anxiety that I’ll be buying a different car next time.

wollsmoth• 4 years ago

It's definitely a Lexus problem. In a ford I think it just continues playing whatever the last played song was.

I also put songs on my iphone instead of using apple music, so I suppose it could be an issue with that service although idk why it would behave way differently from playing local files.

asdf982• 4 years ago

Only in fords with sync 3 or later. sync 2 is garbage

asdf982• 4 years ago

My car does this too when I plug my phone into USB, it starts playing the first song alphabetically no matter what. I became so sick of this I just have a long empty track with tildes in the name in my library. I would assume bluetooth would do the same but my car's bluetooth has been off since it came out of the facotory and I will never turn it on.

Another obnoxious design is if i want to start a playlist I can't just start playing it - It gives me the playlist sorted alphatically. Once i start playing a track it then sorts them by playlist order. Literally the point of a playlist is the order which you choose your songs to be in. Same solution works, put a short empty file with a tilde, 0 or underscore. So when I pick a playlist I just have to press enter twice and not deal with the alphabetically sorted list.

This trick also works when i try to navigate with google maps and my phone is plugged into usb. I wont get the navigation voice if a music track is NOT playing - again I go to my silent track and play it in order to get the navigation voice when my phone plugged into USB

commandlinefan• 4 years ago

it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other

Well, since nobody has ever read the spec in its entirety, it's completely possible that those guys are actually part of the specification, somewhere around page 5000 or so.

Der_Einzige• 4 years ago

This is a weird one. I also have a Lexus, but from the year before they put carplay in. I did an aftermarket carplay upgrade, and I've never had any sort of issue like this with Bluetooth on my wife's iphone before...

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

That sucks. For what it's worth, "old-school" Toyota headunits with Bluetooth seem to work quite well (for Bluetooth). The ones that came with graphics/more complex CPUs seem to have gone downhill.

You can try to install an older model OEM headunit in your car to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Certain models had really decent sound, are cheap when found used online, and should have the same connectors in the back (depending on speaker options). Here's an example of replacing your headunit: https://thetrackahead.com/projects/2003-toyota-4runner/the-u...

Also, I think Auto-play is a setting in the headunit, in mine anyway. If not, your phone may have a setting for it.

nomy99• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if comedy was the intent here, but I laughed a lot.

dllthomas• 4 years ago

I guess you've gotta ask yourself... cui Bono?

denimnerd42• 4 years ago

this EXACT thing happens on my toyota but it's even more annoying because i'll be using my phone and we stop for gas and then when we turn the car back on U2 starts playing from my wife's phone

nobleach• 4 years ago

Oh my gosh, I didn't know where this was going with the half-naked shaved guys until you said, "Songs of Innocence"... and immediately it became a shared experience. If I could somehow tell my phone, "NEVER play Apple Music, always defer to Spotify if you have to auto-play anything", I'd do it in a heartbeat.

conductr2• 4 years ago

This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed into everyone’s playlist as a purchased album, but can be deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this reason. I prefer silence over this.

My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for various reasons. Yet, no matter what, when I start my car it turns back on my phones BT setting and reconnects. (Eg. If my wife is playing her phone, then we stop for an errand, and get back in it always goes back to my phone.)

calt2• 4 years ago

You can uninstall Apple Music. At least there's that saving grace.

darthrupert2• 4 years ago

An Apple problem. Their car connectivity follows the idea that configuration is evil and there's only one way to do a thing.

nostromo3• 4 years ago

This isn't correct. Apple Car Play does not play anything automatically on start. It's the Lexus that is telling the device to begin playing music.

If you don't use Apple Music, it'll pick the only album you have -- which for many people is the U2 album Apple added to everyone's library for free many years ago.

roody15• 4 years ago

Apple has done this for years and my take is they are tying to increase usage and relevance of Apple Music.

For example I only use Spotify in my car but it will not connect correctly unless I download and have Apple Music installed.

Just bad move by apple in my opinion. Just connect by bluetooth and let me use any app want.

Super dumb that you have to put a song labeled A in your song library that is just silence to get around this.

thetinguy• 4 years ago

It’s the car that auto plays the first thing. My old car used to do the same thing. New car no longer does this.

TaylorAlexander2• 4 years ago

The first song in my library was a song by Killswitch Engage. A very loud song with lots of screaming. Ultimately I deleted the Music app from my iPhone to solve the auto play problem. I used Spotify for music at the time (now VLC). Deleting the app to solve the problem definitely feels like an extreme solution to a problem which shouldn’t be a problem at all!

But I have worse Bluetooth problems. My favorite Bluetooth headphones never want to connect the first few times. Trying to connect in this error state turns them off, for some reason. So I have this horrible dance where I turn them on and attempt to connect. My connecting device spins for a while. The headphones have silently turned off. I turn them back in and repeat. After about four times, they will usually connect. But sometimes I have to delete the connection and re-pair. Sometimes I have to turn off Bluetooth on other nearby devices to get it to work. And sometimes when connected, even near my source, the connection just goes silent.

I wish Bluetooth could behave a bit more like FM radio. A source is streaming out audio and my headphones can tune to that secure channel and get the stream. Headphones can tune between channels easily. This would solve my connection woes.

anonair• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, deleting Music app turns off iPod integration, and now I’m unable to use other media players on my car over USB

0x00000000• 4 years ago

If you use Apple Music, it has the additional benefit of wasting all of your data and battery every time you turn your car on since it streams your entire library on shuffle.

I thought I was clever and could fix this problem by using the iPhone’s “Shortcuts” app “Automation” feature to pause after connecting to the car’s Bluetooth. But for some reason the thing called “automation” requires manual fucking interaction every time. Yes, that’s right you have to click on a prompt to run the “automation” shortcut.

Turns out it’s a limitation of the “on connect to Bluetooth” trigger for “security” yet this isn’t explained anywhere. Because if someone stole my phone and car they might be able to... pause the music? Thanks Apple.

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

That's so hilarious considering you've probably been putting up with that for years and years while there's a ton of solutions. Here's a fun fact about U2: If Bono himself is in his own car driving around and it comes on he has to change the channel. Doesn't like hearing his own voice (Not macho enough), nor the band name. [1] I also heard the same thing about Phil Collins.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/bono-says-he-switches-the-radi...

JohnBooty3• 4 years ago

I generally hate Bluetooth. But, your post is golden. I'm sorry you are dealing with it.

    I don't know if it's a Lexus problem, or an Apple problem, 
    but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

My best understanding is that this is a Lexus problem, because on the occasions I have connected wireless speakers to my iPhones this has never happened.

CarPlay solves some of these problems and is maybe not perfect, but generally a far saner UX experience than what car companies have managed to cook up over the years.

I would assume similar things are true for Android Auto. Like, not perfect, but far saner than whatever the heck the UX wizards at Toyota brewed up.

swamp402• 4 years ago

The iPhone forces Apple Music to self-start if nothing else is using the speaker when you auto-connect with a car Bluetooth system.

Kind of like how Windows 10 forces you to use Microsoft Edge as a pdf viewer no matter how many times you switch to Adobe or how many settings you change.

Apple doesn't want you to forget about Apple Music.

auto-magically restores itself somehow iCloud. Apple Music needs something to play.

francisofascii• 4 years ago

This continues to happen in our 2012 Toyota Prius. U2 song “California” from the Sounds of Innocence soundtrack. Don’t remember ever downloading it.

ianceicys• 4 years ago

Tip: remove the Apple Music app from your iPhone and it won't play anything.

kn0where• 4 years ago

On my old car, deleting the music app prevented the shitty radio from detecting that my “iPod” (aka iPhone) was even connected, so I had to have the Music app installed even if I wanted to play Spotify.

moralestapia• 4 years ago

but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

We can agree on that!

nostromo3• 4 years ago

This is primarily a problem with car manufacturers designing terrible user interfaces.

Audi does a reasonably good job. I wouldn’t buy a Toyota or Ford because they tend to be terrible.

At this point, if a car doesn’t let me default to Car Play automatically, I’m not buying it. And if every time I turn on the car it lectures me about driving safely, I’m really not buying it.

xyst• 4 years ago

infotainment systems built by car manufacturers are just absolutely dreadful from an end user perspective. I have had a similar experience in the past (albeit much less of an annoyance) but was fixed 3 years later in a firmware update while randomly visiting the dealership for warranty items.

android auto/apple car play are an absolute dream to use on the other hand. If I buy another car, it will be a must have (rather than an aftermarket accessory)

faebi• 4 years ago

It‘s nearly as good as my story. I‘m walking with airpods past my car. The car detects my keys and turns on bluetooth, iPhone connects and thinks it's better to send audio to my car instead of the airpods in my ears. A long and painful connection loss is the result while I walk away and hope that my airpods reconnect. There is no way to set a presedence or similar. These days it‘s even better, the iPhone also switches to car mode and forces me to disable it first.

flanbiscuit• 4 years ago

Can you turn BT off and connect via a chord?

That's what I do with my car. Sure it's a little annoying to use a chord rather than using BT but at least you wouldn't have it auto-playing when you start the car.

I have an Android and when we had the BT on the radio on, it would auto-connect to my phone and start playing whatever the last thing I was listening to on Spotify. If I stopped Spotify, my phone's audio output would still remain connected to the radio, even if my gf was connected with her iPhone and the system had switched to iOS CarPlay (the radio had both Android Auto and iOS CarPlay)

We finally figured out we could disable BT via the radio's setting and that solved our problem. We actually prefer connecting via a cable anyways.

pbreit• 4 years ago

I have never, not once ever, wanted something to autoplay when a bluetooth device connected.

cryptonector3• 4 years ago

Nowadays you can delete (really, hide), the U2 album. If you delete all remaining music in iTunes, then the U2 album gets restored, and you have to re-delete it.

Other problems:

  - the darned thing is eager to connect
  
    My wife gets in the car to go somewhere,
    turns it on, my phone connects, and I lose
    audio / she steals my audio.
  
  - the darned thing connects even if the car's
    audio is off
  
    get in, use a maps app, can't hear anything,
    ohhh, right!
  
  - carplay uses wifi, iphone fails to route
    properly
  
    can't use carplay
  
  - anyways, carplay is super sensitive to EM
    noise
  
    be me, be driving w/ navigation on, go through
    high-traffic, EM noisy area, lose navigation
    -- distracting!  dangerous!

Solution:

  - refuse to connect to the car's wifi
  
  - that means no carplay
  
  - that means no distractions
  
  - delete the U2 album
  
  - delete it harder
  
  - turn off bluetooth every morning
  
  - that means no more stolen audio when
    someone drives the family cars

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I can't imagine not hating U2.

cryptonector3• 4 years ago

but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

I bet your comment has hundreds of upvotes already.

calt2• 4 years ago

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music because it would similarly play the same song (I forget what it was) at surprising times.

Spotify doesn't give me the same problem.

Robotbeat• 4 years ago

I had to laugh so hard at this as I’m literally sitting in my Tesla listening to Songs of Innocence that autoplayed on my iPhone without my explicit consent for exactly the reason you mention. I swear I have Stockholm Syndrome because the album that Apple forced my to download is slowly growing on me.

t3e2• 4 years ago

We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.

worthless-trash5• 4 years ago

Not sure if it matters, but many aftermarket head units can have the reversing camera connected to restore factory functionality, I believe the average HN reader could do this.

Edit: https://motoristcare.com/how-to-connect-backup-camera-to-hea...

Is a pretty good example on how to complete this.

tarunkotia• 4 years ago

This happens to me every time I enter my car while on a Zoom call; the bluetooth or even the hardwired headset would switch to the car speakers and the call gets unmuted. I need to scramble to mute the call while my daughter is screaming at the back. Can't get it to work.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

This is one of those stories you read where you thought it was just you but then realize it’s happening to a bunch of people

rewgs• 4 years ago

I ended up just uninstalling Apple Music so that music wouldn't autoplay in my Prius. Absolutely ridiculous that that was the only way.

exabrial• 4 years ago

My android didn’t have this problem. When i switched to iPhone it did. A quick Google search will give you similar results.

I believe this is in Apple problem.

rcv• 4 years ago

I have a 2010 Toyota Prius, and I've intermittently had the exact same problem. Except my song was "Oogum Boogum" - fortunately it was the Alex Chilton version which I still like.

My latest struggle is that my phone now plays audio at 50% speed through my cars bluetooth. Spotify, Youtube, etc - it doesn't matter. It seems to play 50% speed super low pitch for about a second and then skip forward in the audio stream about a second. The only thing that remedies this is to reboot my car.

pxmpxm• 4 years ago

Wow definitely bringing back repressed memories for me - my audi s8 for whatever reason would refuse to stream via a2dp unless I had some music actually on the phone, in which case it would auto play said music after some random delay. So my brilliant solution was a 5 second silent mp3 loaded on my phone - it would keep the bt gods happy and i could switch to a2dp at my leisure. This was perfect, until someone decided to force deploy the same half naked men on my phone.

webinvest• 4 years ago

Buy or load a $0.99 silent song that starts with the letter A and you won’t have this problem any more.

kyaghmour3• 4 years ago

Because it's RF, shipping firmware can't be open source -- end user tweakable and replaceable. I bet this is one reason BT will never be good. If it could be open source there would be a winning stacks (or a few) that would bubble up on some git repo and be good enough for most everyone.

thiagocsf• 4 years ago

Is that because of regulation? What’s the concern of having open source for RF firmwares?

kyaghmour3• 4 years ago

Regulatory requirements and certification.

arein3• 4 years ago

Is that a law?

There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

doctor_lollipop• 4 years ago

There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware

I use these almost exclusively for laptops and routers, I keep ripping Intel wifi cards out of laptops and replacing them with ath9k cards.

Ever since I started doing so things "just work" - no more random disconnects, lockups, need-to-reboot-to-get-wifi-working-again etc.

Technology can be so nice if it's open.

stephen_g• 4 years ago

There’s no reason Bluetooth stacks couldn’t be open source - unlike a GSM modem, a Bluetooth chipset should only be able to transmit in the 2.5GHz ISM band, which is unlicensed. Even if you can change the LO enough to get outside the band, there should be hardware filtering etc.

Of course, commercially available SDRs can transmit in all sorts of bands including licensed ones if you write the code to do so, and there are plenty of open-source applications for SDR, so it’s not like it’s impossible to legally have open firmware for whatever chipsets (even cellular modems)…

kyaghmour3• 4 years ago

It's not just the licensed bands but also SAR. Commercial devices with BT are often close to the body. For those devices to be certified they have to operate within specific power levels, and this has to not be operable/changeable. If you can change power levels, you can bust the SAR limits.

It's one thing for geeks to do what they want with SDRs. It's another to get the certification to ship a real product.

jeshin• 4 years ago

the pine phone has end user replaceable firmware for its LTE modem. there exists an unofficial open source alternative for the official firmware (which incidentally has vulnerabilities that quectel seems to be unwilling to patch)

_Algernon_• 4 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

amelius4• 4 years ago

The same holds for USB.

oblio2• 4 years ago

USB A? Nope, super reliable for 5 nines of users and use cases. With billions of users you still get millions of duds, but that's ok.

USB C is... Complicated.

noisymemories• 4 years ago

Ha anyone been able to deploy a better behaving protocol over the same ASICs/SoCs in so many years? I mean, I'm pretty sure no hardware or software vendor is remotely happy with the current status quo.

iasay2• 4 years ago

BT was actually fucking with me badly. I have a Sony soundbar and someone was connecting to it periodically and playing music really loud at 2AM. I had the BT mode on it turned off and the discovery stuff turned off. But still getting connections.

Got fed up with it, opened it up and cut the BT antenna foil off the board in the end. Silence is bliss.

autoexec• 4 years ago

More than that, multiple US government agencies have advised consumers that using Bluetooth risks leaving their devices more vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.

It was the security issues that first started me leaving Bluetooth disabled on my phones, but I'm glad that I did since it's so often being used to track us. Bluetooth tracking beacons are inexpensive and require less power than wifi trackers (which are still all over the place). They can run a long time on a battery or using RF to DC, allowing them to be easily and discretely mounted and can be triggered by motion/proximity sensors to extend battery life even further. They can be placed to log your location to within a couple feet, but some beacons can track you from many miles away.

I've had my phone set to disable wifi and Bluetooth when I'm out of range of my usual networks. I can always manually enable either if I need it, but because I've still got a phone with a headphone jack, I've never actually needed to enable bluetooth. Laptops have the same issues. I'm hoping my next laptop will allow me to disable it in UEFI.

UWB and 5G are also things to keep an eye on if you're concerned about being tracked and monitored.

tbihl• 4 years ago

My only complaint is, I suspect, a regulatory thing. Cars don't let you pair when driving, which is perfectly useless since the only time you pair a new phone to your car is when you have a new passenger wanting to connect her phone...

Other than that, my Bluetooth experience is perfectly boring 99%+ of the time.

AmericanChopper• 4 years ago

There’s a huge problem with BT that the article doesn’t seem to touch on at all, which is that it’s too low-bandwidth to provide a good experience for many of its intended use cases. It has no high quality full duplex audio profile. It is literally not possible to use a Bluetooth headset that doesn’t very noticeably degrade the audio quality for both yourself and your audience.

itomato• 4 years ago

Maybe it’s out of spec, but my little cassette boombox with Bluetooth outperforms every other device I’ve used.

Instant pairing. Multiple devices. Unwavering signal.

Only the speakers and driver circuit let me down. It’s tinny and quiet, even at full volume with tone knob adjustments.

Still, it’s a sure thing as far as connection goes.

amiga-workbench• 4 years ago

The most grating "feature" of Bluetooth is having headphones that support fancy AAC/AptX codecs, but as soon as you want to make use of its microphone it dumps the connection right back to A2DP.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

I guess during the many years developing AptX, they thought that obviously nobody would ever want to hear high-quality audio and use the microphone at the same time!

nyanpasu64• 4 years ago

Or worse, buying a touchscreen car stereo unit from China, that's basically an Android tablet running on bottom-of-the-barrel hardware, and its Bluetooth headset mode switches to fucking 64 kbit/s CVSD which sounds like an 8 KHz phone line plus added "clipping" sounds from slope overload distortion.

vel0city• 4 years ago

A2DP doesn't support microphones. You're thinking of Headset Profile (HSP). That's the low-latency profile with mic support.

DoingIsLearning2• 4 years ago

The biggest relevation I had with bluetooth was seeing an actual pairing sequence and data transmission on an RF spectrum analyser.

It really is low-power. Once you realize it is a rat's fart above the noise floor you have a whole new appreciation for the fact that it even works in the first place.

cedivad• 4 years ago

No, you had a bad test setup. BT is 10dB below wifi, I can't see how what you are saying makes sense. Also it uses simple encodings that save on processing power but require more rf power to be decoded successfully.

DoingIsLearning2• 4 years ago

No, you had a bad test setup.

I was not in a test chamber at all and I had all sorts of real world background noise. Not sure what you mean, if bad setup means real-world with all sorts of automobile RF noise then yes, it was a bad setup?

stackbutterflow• 4 years ago

For those who don't know, every 3db the energy is halved/doubled.

So at -10db the energy has been halved over 3 times.

knorker4• 4 years ago

No, that's not it.

That's not why my bluetooth disconnects every single time I unsuspend my chromebook, about 2 minutes after connecting bluetooth it'll disconnect again, and will be permanently on the second time.

That's not why I have to reboot my phone sometimes, or reboot my headphones, to get it to "unstuck". And the fact that it works to "turn it off and on again".

It's reliably broken, not just by random patterns.

If it were signal strength then we'd be seeing dropped packets. I get some dropped packets when on the other side of the house, on a different floor, from the transmitter. Yet sometimes I can still not get anything through at all when the devices are right next to each other, until I reboot them.

And power goes down with distance squared. "Right next to each other" is at that point almost (but not quite) "so loud it could damage each other's receiver".

causi2• 4 years ago

My biggest problem with Bluetooth is never having a good way to figure out why something's not working right. For example, one time I wanted to transfer photos from a phone to a tablet with no internet. With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps. Instead it was around 50KB/s. Why? Who knows. My crappy eight year old bluetooth receiver, while not having quite the audio quality of my newer headphones, has zero perceptible latency. My newer headphones are practically useless for gaming but if I try to use the headset profile the quality is so low as to be worthless for anything but phone calls. How is the old one doing it better? I have no idea.

dmitrygr• 4 years ago

With one on BT 3 and one on BT 4, the theoretical speed should've been 20mbps

Um, no... I have no idea where you got that number.

Since EDR (BT 2.1) added 3Mbps, no faster modulations were added. And that is raw rate without framing or protocol.

BT3.0 added ability to offload actual xfer to another protocol (like wifi) but nobody implements this

BT4.0 just added LE (another modulation, another set of protocols) at 1 Mbps

BT4.2 added a faster rate of 2Mbps for LE

Source: a full-blown case of PTSD from working on BT for years

im3w1l• 4 years ago

I recently used bluetooth headphones (airpods) in a summer cottage in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. The phone (samsung) was inches from the headphones. In other words, it's hard to imagine better radio conditions. And yet, the connection occasionally glitched (a handful of times over a total of many hours).

seydor• 4 years ago

I had started to like my bluetooth headset, but then one day it stopped working during a presentation. Never again.

byteflip2• 4 years ago

As someone who worked on Bluetooth in consumer electronics for years the title gave me a good laugh.

kretaceous• 4 years ago

<rant>

Someone should make a Bluetooth alternative just for audio transmission with a sane, forward-compatible spec.[1]

More than half of Bluetooth woes will disappear.

When I was annoyed to no end by my headphones, I searched upon Bluetooth alternatives and why are they not in widespread use. I did not find much.

Bluetooth needs a rebirth.

1: No. Don't reply with xkcd 926.

</rant>

croddin• 4 years ago

Ok I’ll reply with https://xkcd.com/2055/ then ;-) I wish something like what is described in this comic could be implemented as pairing method in a future version of Bluetooth. It sounds like it could help some of the problems.

bandrami• 4 years ago

Is Bluetooth a secure comms protocol? Admittedly, no. But is it a reliable, easy-to-use protocol fit for mass consumption? Also, no.

knorker4• 4 years ago

Sometimes people make excuses for bluetooth. Like "it can do so many things, that's why it's so complex and can get bugs".

No. Just no.

99.999% of use cases is "get audio to my headphones, and possibly from its mic too".

20 years and we can't even get the primary use case to work.

If this were about setting up some esoteric "I can't believe bluetooth can do this" feature, then maybe.

But just get audio to work. That's it. This is not fusion power, yet seems to be as hard for the people implementing it.

meltyness2• 4 years ago

This happens with all networking.

The most well-funded companies oscillate between "trying to get ahead" by hacking in "whatever's next" and selling that to people and "just blowing off the spec" because they're not getting paid enough. This is a sedementary process because of whatever business-related adage stops them from rewriting their code.

The next awful bit is what happens to the spec itself. We show up in Vegas at the Bluetooth conference in the hottest July on record. No one can share any vision about what this thing is supposed to do, or replace, so everyone just sneezes into the multithousand page specification.

The multithousand page specification is actually a paid affair as well, and it's inefficient, confusing, poorly organized, and loooooong, so everyone just ends up building what they think the spec "sounds like."

Even better, there's a deadline creeping up, because there's a rumor that Competitor B is pushing out their part of the stack in November, and even if we pay the unbelievable fee to the FCC to get expedited treatment, it's still a 2 month wait, if it's approved -- not to mention legal's checks.

...at least, that's what it looks like to an outsider.

knorker4• 4 years ago

It happens with other things, but Bluetooth is not other things.

It doesn't need high speed. Just barely enough to get some audio through.

Bluetooth should have been perfected over a decade ago, and chips with perfect operation should be a commodity.

It's just not cutting edge, and shouldn't be.

Digit-Al• 4 years ago

I have a Philips soundbar with Bluetooth. A couple or so years ago I was playing music on it from my laptop and the connection started crackling and then just died. I could not get any of my devices to connect, and even tried a factory reset with no luck. I was thinking I would have to buy a new one, but the next day I tried it again and it connected immediately with no problem. It's happened a couple more times since then and I have found that if I just out it back on standby and leave it for an as yet undetermined amount of time it starts working again.

It's very strange.

I've also found that if my phone connects to my laptop through Bluetooth at the same time that I am streaming music via Bluetooth from my laptop to my soundbar the phone will cause interference and the music will keep crackling and dropping out.

ChrisRR• 4 years ago

I worked on Bluetooth at the stack level, and from my experience of the specification, there's not any single thing that causes it to be flaky. Every level that I have experience with seems to be well defined.

So why the hell is it so difficult to pair and connect? I have no idea. I can only assume that each level of the stack has a number of corner cases that all together create a perfect storm, because otherwise the specification seems to be robust enough that it shouldn't have such an issue with connecting.

EMM_386• 4 years ago

In my Mazda, every time I get into my car my Android phone alerts me there is a Blutooth pairing request from the car.

Whether I authorize it or not, Bluetooth doesn't work.

Then this occurs a second time about 1 minute later, with exactly the same results. I have to deal with this every time I use the car.

When I try to have the car and phone scan for each other, they don't show up. The car doesn't see the phone, and the phone doesn't see the car.

I have given up even trying to get it to work.

chrsw• 4 years ago

Last time I checked the Bluetooth and BLE specs were massive documents. That's always a red flag for me. Low level tech like this should be clear, simple, concise and unambiguous. You can add complexity to the layers on top, if you must, if your application demands it. But as it stands the designers of the spec let the complexity escape everywhere.

01100011• 4 years ago

I worked for a company developing 802.15.3 over a decade ago. It gave me some insight into how these specs are developed. It's a complete shit-show. The company would pay non-technical folks, like relatives of employees or whatever, to attend IEEE meetings so they'd have more votes to skew the process. Technical merits have little to do with what ends up in the spec.

eimrine• 4 years ago

When I first time interacted with Bluetooth, my expectation was that when I pair a telephone and a PC, I can share sound and Internets in both directions exactly as it is possible to do that with files. It was maybe 15 years ago and all what has changed nowadays is a... low energy only? Maybe we the people have to liberate the Bluetooth stack somewhat?

haplessam• 4 years ago

I can't enable bluetooth on my Sony TV because it displays a pop up dialog box when anything tries to connect with it, which is frequent due to some unknown neighbor's device constantly trying to pair with it 24/7. It renders the TV unwatchable. There's no way to disable bluetooth pairing on the TV aside from disabling bluetooth entirely - a well known design flaw. Naively, the TV designers assumed all devices (and people) are well behaved, and it was thought to be convenient to have one less configuration mode.

gorjusborg• 4 years ago

he himself uses it seamlessly — some "70% of the time."

70% of the time, it works every time.

FerretFred• 4 years ago

Try pairing (and actually using) an exotic Bluetooth device (y'know, a keyboard, mouse) with a Raspberry Pi via the command line. That's REAL pain.

mattacular• 4 years ago

Bluetooth works ok if you're not sharing receivers or if you don't have more than one device acting as transmitter. Anything beyond that where you're mixing and switching devices, or sharing receivers (like multiple speakers in your household etc.) it gets so easily confused.

I've even had problems following my wife's car. Despite being fully paired with my car and working great, the transmitter (phone) will keep trying to connect to hers.

It's probably one of the most frustrating mainstream technologies that you're basically forced to use as physical connections become less and less available.

jeffnappi2• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is quite amazing in general. What it is capable of with extremely low energy usage is just mind blowing really.

I think the main reason it gets a bad rap (e.g. vs WiFi) is that the radio link is conflated with all of the messiness of codec/protocol compatibility and features provided over said radio link.

If there were standards for devices to stream audio over WiFi links, I imaging we'd see nearly similar frustrations in codec, latency and compatibility issues - it's incredibly complex.

Much respect to the engineers out there who make it a good experience. I personally tried my hand at tackling wide-band speech support with PulseAudio etc [1] and I was humbled by the complexity present in the protocol/codec layers.

Hats off to the teams at both PulseAudio and PipeWire who have brought wide band speech support to Linux Desktops :)

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18...

listless2• 4 years ago

I think the main problem is exactly as the article states - there no standard for how things connect to each other. If they could just make the connection standard everywhere, that would get rid of a ton of the silliness.

jeffnappi2• 4 years ago

Try getting thousands of organizations to agree on something and then implement it successfully... The complexity of the problem far surpasses that of the technical standards themselves.

yndoendo• 4 years ago

Dear platform creators for Bluetooth, Please implement a privacy and battery saving measure. Where once I turn off the paired device, such as a car or headphones, the platform automatically turns off the Bluetooth radio. This prevents tracking with-in stores or offices. Saves battery power. And prevents the device from auto-connecting to my car during ignition. Just because I was using Bluetooth before I arrived does not mean I want to use bluetooth once I depart.

I currently manually do this everytime.

kshahkshah• 4 years ago

Beyond some of the autoplay issues - which are software based and not the protocols problem - I haven't had any truly major issues with Bluetooth since 4.1

Honestly since 4.1 it has been overwhelmingly a positive experience. Yes I need to manually click the bluetooth icon in my toolbar on my mac every once in a while to re-establish a connection but that is the extent to which I have troubles.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

I have one bluetooth device that I connect to my TV that just captures anything it's ever been connected to, no matter where it is in the house. No amount of unpairing or repairing can overcome it. It's actually kind of impressive.

haskell_melody• 4 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/

m3kw9• 4 years ago

1 word: unreliability

grumple• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is such a pain in the ass even as a techy. Most people probably just pair their iphones to their airpods and call it a day. But trying to use multiple bluetooth devices with each other (phones, laptops, ipads, connecting to headphones, speakers, and cars) is always a juggling act. Disconnect. Turn the headphones off. Sometimes forget the connection. Get out of range of the other device. Turn the headphones on. Turn bluetooth off. Turn it on.

Comments mention NFC pairing. That would be better in most cases.

gchokov• 4 years ago

I love bluetooth. My mouse, my keyboard, my airpods, my other NC headphones, carplay, TV remote, smart home devices - so many of them working 99% of time just totally fine. Small glitches from time to time are small price to pay for the convenience my everyday tools bring to my life.

fleddr• 4 years ago

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases.

Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed".

Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What on earth are two devices directly next to each other doing for 60 seconds?

I also have a few BT controlled LEDs where from an app I control brightness and color temperature. My phone is always in range, but the BT connection just doesn't sustain itself. It intermittently drops after which I need to redo the setup again on every single light.

I'm sure the reason is "low power" or "interference" but that doesn't mean anything. It's not actionable. It's fragile and unreliable tech.

jkaptur• 4 years ago

I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create its own, and instead just fails to work.

deepsun2• 4 years ago

perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" ...

ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge -- there's no relative measure.

deepsun2• 4 years ago

Often it's a problem with firmware/driver implementation in one of those devices (like speaker), resulting from poor development processes.

Complexity of Bluetooth protocol, multiplied by the speaker price (assuming you have not the really expensive ones) does not help as well.

avidiax• 4 years ago

You could actually have the devices too close (overdriving the RF receiver). Or the two antennas are oriented with their null directions facing each other.

My go-to method to get difficult BT gear to pair is to place both devices in the microwave and shut the door. The microwave is a faraday cage for 2.4Ghz, so it removes interference as a potential problem. If it still fails, you can turn on the microwave and enjoy a light show at least.

toxik3• 4 years ago

My main problem with Bluetooth is connecting and disconnecting devices together.

Want to use your corded headphones on your phone? Just plug them in. Want to switch to your computer? Just plug them in there.

Want to use your Bluetooth headphones with your computer? Turn them on. Check what they automatically connected to if anything. If wrong, find that device, disconnect Bluetooth, go back to computer, find device in Bluetooth menu somewhere and connect. Pray that the device doesn’t require you to enter discovery mode. Repeat the process for switching. Bonus points if your smartwatch was involved.

hedora• 4 years ago

Neither the article nor the comments provide a theory as to why it is such a train wreck.

Unlike most networking technologies (like Ethernet and WiFi) the Bluetooth spec specifies application level protocols (like audio encodings, metadata, etc).

You could imagine that could work in theory, but in practice, it means that each device's firmware reimplements all sorts of high level stuff.

Imagine you had to use an unpatchable web browser that was bundled with (and ran inside of) a $20 USB -> Ethernet dongle.

scifibestfi2• 4 years ago

It this a problem with bluetooth or the devices that use bluetooth? Because my AirPods Pro work great, but most other devices are hit and miss.

matrixcubed• 4 years ago

Arch Enemy’s “Aces High” cover-song autoplayed one too many times at too-high a volume first thing in the morning while preparing to drive to work. I eventually cleared out my Apple Music songs and much more calmly welcome whatever pop station my wife leaves the radio on instead when I start my car.

1970-01-01• 4 years ago

Everyone should start a timer and try to transfer 3 small files (1-2MB) from their phone to another device, via Bluetooth, right now. Can anyone successfully copy all 3 small files in under 3 minutes?

rootusrootus5• 4 years ago

What I get from this thread is that it probably matters what RF noise you have in your environment. Some people have lots of trouble regardless of device, some people have no problems at all. I suspect the latter are in a quieter RF environment. I can get quite a long ways from my laptop before my wireless headphones start to cut out. And I don't have any significant issues getting or staying connected. I live in a residential neighborhood, not an apartment, so maybe my location is pretty low-noise.

dkarl2• 4 years ago

I hate that my bluetooth headphones glitch when they're connected to multiple devices. Something my phone does at irregular intervals causes audio from other sources to skip, even though the phone isn't actually making a sound. I manually disconnect from my phone multiple times per day so I can listen to media on my laptop without being interrupted.

Balgair• 4 years ago

Bluetooth horror story time?

I was trying to get a system working to record the motions of vampire bats (long story). Previous people had decided on a small backpack mounted to the bats with a LiPo battery, the sensors, and a Bluetooth transmitter to a laptop for data recording.

Everytime someone would walk by the room within 3 floors, the sensors would try to pair with their phone instead of keeping the connection to the laptop. If that sounds like nonsense, yes, I agree. Since this was in a research hospital there were no 'good' hours as patients and MDs and nurses walked by all the time. RF noise and the like is deep-dark-magic in normal times, combine with Bluetooth and you get a Rogaine subscription.

I did get it working, with Bluetooth even, but only after spending a weekend building a crummy Faraday cage with screendoor mesh, a ton of soldering, duct tape, and dodgy ground loops into the wall outlets.

Bluetooth, never again

kypro• 4 years ago

Really? This isn't my experience. I use several BT devices regularly and they all work fine. The only time I run into issues is when using shared devices. For example, both me and my girlfriend share a car and when we get in the car together one of our phones will automatically connect which often means one of us will need to manually disconnect and reconnect if the wrong device pairs first. I'm not sure this is a flaw with BT so much though, or at least it's a bit of an edge case and could probably be addressed with a better implementation.

The one technology that I still find unreasonably painful after decades of development is inkjet printers. I have no idea why it's still so difficult to reliably connect a printer to a device. To reliably print a document without random blank pages or weird margin issues. For the printer not to require cleaning and alignment with every use. And for the printer to do anything within a reasonable timeframe - sometimes it takes several minutes after clicking print for the printer to actually start printing anything.

Bluetooth in comparison is really good.

justinzollars• 4 years ago

My door, yes my front door is controlled by a bluetooth device. It's a horrible horrible experience.

amichal• 4 years ago

I have 3 BT headphone things. They are all paired to both my mac and my iPhone. Something changed recently. If paired to my mac two out of the three play on hold beeps whenever my Google Meet meeting is muted. Or, and this is really annoying, if my computer happens to transition through some sort of sleep state in the other room. So, if I have them on at night and unless I remembered to disconnect my computer at the end of the work day, I am woken up in the middle of the night with random on hold beeps until I get up, go to the other room, and disconnect the computer.

On top of that they both of course randomly activate Siri in my iPhone (despite me setting Siri to only activate if I press the side button) and they both auto play the same random song.

amitp• 4 years ago

I had a problem with the combination of Google Meet, my bluetooth headphones (Aftershokz), and Mac OS Monterey. It would keep beeping and putting it on hold. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-automatic-... was the workaround for me, and also in Zoom I disabled "automatically adjust microphone volume". Frustrating.

I have a separate problem where if my computer goes to sleep or goes out of range, the headphones keep beeping until I turn them off. :-/ But this seems specific to the one I'm using and hasn't happened with my others.

teddyh• 4 years ago

Obligatory xkcd from 2018: https://xkcd.com/2055/

encryptluks2• 4 years ago

I feel like for the most part car manufacturers are to blame for the proprietary poorly designed infotainment systems that have issues all around.

wldcordeiro• 4 years ago

My biggest pain point right now with Bluetooth and my phone is that it's *all* media going through the paired device. I want to be able to pin just my music app audio to go out a speaker and still be able to use my phone speaker for all other apps but that's not possible.

DelaneyM• 4 years ago

I used to serve on a BT SIG, and the current state of things does not surprise me. I was both blown away by the technical expertise of some of the contributors, from whom I learned a ton about platform philosophy & standards that I still use today; and deeply disappointed by the role PMs & BizDev played in proactively breaking compatibility just to preserve the option to someday take advantage of the standard for short-term profit.

Really interesting though, if you're early in your career and have the option to participate in a standards body I strongly recommend it.

eternityforest• 4 years ago

The only painful points I've seen for BT:

Some devices can't pair with multiple hosts(Not a big deal for me)

My phone has a bug where BT will turn itself off occasionally, and there are basically no times when I want BT to be off.

The latency is just a tiny bit too high for it to replace wireless mics in live sound, real missed opportunity to finally standardize that.

matt_heimer• 4 years ago

Found out recently that Samsung Buds automatically go into pairing mode when you open their case which you do often because they charge in it. There is no way to prevent the behavior. So every time you go to use them all the nearby Windows computers prompt if you'd like to pair them and if you take them out of their case in public there is no way to prevent other people from pairing with them and playing whatever they want. Both the Buds 2 and Buds Pro are like this.

Also have some JayBirds and Bose Sport headphones in a similar form factor and thankfully you have to press a button on them to enter pairing mode.

epx• 4 years ago

Zigbee failed in a similar way, didn't it? An exceptionally complex protocol (for the intended usage) that left out a major interoperability aspect: the pairing phase. (BT fixed this partially by adding Secure Simple Pairing.)

Wireless protocols are inherently more complex, there are crappy Wi-Fi hardware out there, too.

BT and Zigbee have one additional disavantage over Wi-Fi: they are slow, so they are more heavily affected by packet loss and interference in ISM band. This probably lead to more complex protocols, you cannot do things TCP/IP-simple if you don't have bandwidth to spare in order to retransmit losses.

foobarbecue• 4 years ago

IMO the problem with bluetooth is applicable to many modern technologies:

- it can do a lot of things and in many scenarios there are decisions to make (which device to connect to? multiple? should I start playing something? what? should I stop the other thing? play over it?)

- instead of focusing on making it configurable, the designers focused on trying to guess what the average user wants (no users are average)

And then there's the seperate fact that it doesn't have any decent 2-way audio protocols STILL which makes me sad.

znkynz• 4 years ago

My favourite thing about bluetooth is how when i drive past my missus car randomly, my phone connects to it, and my podcasts play in her car :/

yalogin• 4 years ago

The user experience is also terrible. In all the Bluetooth enabled cars I saw, the audio starts playing the moment the phone connects to the car. There isn’t anyway to disable it. This is a problem for atleast 5-7yrs now. Even Tesla and apple couldn’t fix it

amluto• 4 years ago

I suspect this is a problem with the car: it connects and sends the command to play. But Tesla has a particularly poor implementation in which it will do this even if it’s not playing the Bluetooth stream — the phone would stream into the void and the car will play other music.

I don’t think this is Apple’s fault. Apple could add a per-peer setting to disable play commands over Bluetooth or maybe to disable them within a few seconds of connecting.

SAI_Peregrinus2• 4 years ago

That's app dependent, at least on Android. I've got the PowerAmp music player as my default, it has an option to disable "Resume on Bluetooth".

aljgz• 4 years ago

A lot of pain points in Bluetooth can be easily addressed by simple UX research: Phones and computers try to decide when to connect to a Bluetooth device. Just giving users an option like: "Connect to this device automatically" and unchecking it by default goes a long way.

I had a Bluetooth speaker. An unknown neighbour was connected to it and there was no way for me to use this speaker, remotely, until I moved to another place.

At night, I play sleep music on my Sonos wireless speaker. If I restart my Linux laptop, it connects to the speaker's Bluetooth interface, playing an annoying sound for my sleeping wife. I should remember to disconnect from it, or my music will be played to her.

If you have a Bluetooth speaker, every time you turn it on, you have to find the phone/laptop that has connected to it, disconnect, and then connect the one that you want to use at the moment.

Makes me wonder: do designers of these products use their products in any capacity?

Friedduck• 4 years ago

We need a BT manifesto of how phones, cars, etc should behave: 1. Don’t start any program/activity unless directed. 2. Don’t switch output devices without confirmation.

My biggest complaints are my car taking over a call mid-conversation (I pull in driveway and my wife is on the phone in the house) and now I’m hearing her call; or switching between 2 BT devices when I didn’t ask for it.

rapjr9• 4 years ago

I do not know if this is true, but I read somewhere long ago that Bluetooth was intentionally designed to be complex to create a high barrier to entry for companies implementing wireless data, particularly in the phone industry but perhaps to make things like peer-to-peer protocols difficult to implement reliably also. ANT+ is certainly much easier to use and more stable. The Bluetooth spec in its entirety is up to what now, 3000-5000 pages? Do you have a year to read it and understand it before starting your project? And all the Bluetooth vendors have created their own custom stacks with incompatible API's "designed to make using Bluetooth easier" but also ensuring that it is difficult to switch vendors and making it difficult to do anything custom (first you have to reverse engineer their API, then guess what is inside their proprietary firmware stack). I've heard the same things about the SD card standard.

Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

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