I hate Bluetooth

ok

Its one of the technologies that have an monopoly on certain usages.

For internet access we have DSL, cabel, fiber, ...
for local local data transfer there is wifi, ethernet and fiber. But for things like headsets we only have bluetooth.

@stop My issue with it is that it's still so limiting.

It has ridiculous range problems, even with high end hardware.

It's very difficult to troubleshoot when it's not working, or not working reliably.

Headsets sometimes randomly disconnect, and most devices will just switch to an alternative audio device -- now you have porn audio at max on your laptop speaker.

The other way around is a problem as well: In many games, your headset disconnects and reconnects mid-game, the only way to get your audio back is by restarting the game.

The most amazing use case for a bluetooth would be true multi-pairing: The ability to have one headset connected to a PC and phone simultaneously, or multiple headsets to one device. There are multipoint devices/bridges, but it's still a whole mess of profile stuff, and either only TX, only RX or only range extension supported.

Meh. Firstworld problems.

The type of multi-parings you are asking for audio devices is in work in new BT specs , it’s called “LE audio”

@Nanos linux has its problems too.

@stop I think Bluetooth's problems are more in all the legacy backwards compatibly shit and all the mixing of technologies and profiles. It's a "confusing standards" issue more than it's a "bad OS implementation" issue.

For example, my headset is supposed to do multipoint with PC and phone, supporting full audio from PC, and "call audio" from phone. Doesn't work. It might be Windows' fault, or Android's, or the headset — but I feel like it's truly Bluetooth's "fault" for having all these technologies like A2DP, HFP, HSP whatever. There's all this legacy protocol crap for SIM contact sharing, etc.

If we could redesign it, I'd make it so that you'd pair a larger group of Bluetooth Audio transmitters and receivers into one pool. Transmitters can set the "network label" and can evict receivers from the pool, and all devices together form a labeled meshnet which increase range.

@bittersweet I used to work on a project where an app has to communicate with a BLE device
It was a nightmare. You run 100 tests, you get 100 different results.
You never really understand what is happening, and have to restart everything frequently

Yeah it's shit

Yes

@justHarry early implementation of ble 4.0 was pretty shit specially from android side. I never saw such problems for ios . Although i find that from 4.2 onwards everything was smooth.

@bittersweet which headsets you have, i never saw such problem with bose QC35

@hardfault well 99% of the problems were solved once we removed "bonding". That shit made it unreliable af. Had to even replace with our own implementation of a handshake and encryption

iOS was smooth as butter indeed. The iOS team was amazed at how much work it took for it to work on Android. Still every now and then a Huawei fucked everything up

@justHarry i am aware of these problems, with “just works” paring things get pretty shitty. Best way is to use MITM , but all devices cannot use MITM.

The work around that i did was to delete paring from list so every time a device is connected bonding will happen again.

It was extremely annoying, problem is you can overcome these things if you go through spec.
But a APP developer should not be worried about that, that’s the task of phone manufacturers