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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

• turtleman1338 4y 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_S 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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/review-apple-vs-google-usb-c-headphone-adapters.5541/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
• baybal2 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• ChuckNorris89 4y 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.
  • Groxx 4y 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?
• google234123 4y 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 4y ago
    I hope LE audio will fix that
    • out_of_protocol 4y ago
      By the way, what LE stands for? Legendary Edition?
      • shakna 4y ago
        "Lite". The Bluetooth 5 spec is over a thousand pages long. The Lite Edition spec is "only" a few hundred, IIRC.
      • kuschku 4y ago
        Originally, Low Energy. Bluetooth LE removes all the different communication modes and introduces a single, packet network based approach for everything. You may remember the switch from bluetooth connections being something you had to manually enable every time you wanted it, to devices just being connected all the time (without causing your battery to drop). That’s what LE enabled. The switch to the single packet network approach obviously also simplified everything else you might want to transmit. The audio specs are still from the pre-LE era with different modes for everything you might do (modem, fax, headset, headphones, HID, etc), and LE Audio introduces a new and clean way for that.
        • zwirbl 4y ago
          To expand on that, there is a pretty accessible free book covering LE Audio available here https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-audio-book/?utm_campaign=le-audio&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=blog&utm_content=introducing-le-audio-bluetooth-le-audio-applications https://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-resources/le-audio-book/...
• sgt 4y 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.
  • bluescrn 4y ago
    Good hardware ruined by non-replaceable batteries
    • sgt 4y ago
      Lithium-ion, should last a long time
      • bluescrn 4y ago
        If you're an audiobook or podcast enthusiast, you can get through a lot of charge cycles (and deep discharges) rather quickly. If you're using them frequently, expect to notice significantly degraded battery life in less then 2 years of use.
        • wildrhythms 4y ago
          I've started to notice my ~2 year old Bose earbuds only charge to 90% battery (it announces this when powered on), even after a full night's charge.
      • mort96 4y ago
        Really? Phone batteries are lithium ion, and they get very noticeably worse after just a year or two.
• MattPalmer1086 4y 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 4y 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.
    • MattPalmer1086 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• pondidum 4y ago
  I've not had problems with bluetooth for years. Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?
  • klodolph 4y 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.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • kmarc 4y 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_go 4y 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.
    • kristopolous 4y 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).
• donatj 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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".
• m12k 4y 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_S 4y 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.
    • byteflip 4y 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.
  • shakna 4y 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.
• trollied 4y ago
  There's some good stuff in the pipeline for Bluetooth. Auracast: https://www.bluetooth.com/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).
• ChildOfChaos 4y 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.
  • vladvasiliu 4y 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 4y 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...
    • criddell 4y 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.
      • PainfullyNormal 4y ago
        Isn't that essentially NFC pairing? I've had considerably better luck with NFC technology as a whole than with bluetooth.
  • diogenescynic 4y 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.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  My experience has been pretty good on cars after 2015 when using iphone Cars Speakers And other apple products Unusually awesome
  • iso1631 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    • toxik 4y ago
• anotherhue 4y 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_S 4y ago
  Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.
  • qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    Just turn on the emotors and watch all those connections scramble.
  • badthingfactory 4y 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 4y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
    • oblio 4y 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.
      • Koshkin 4y ago
        > It needed an HP account to be able to scan. You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without creating an HP account.
        • dmix 4y ago
          Yeah my mom has HP wireless printers and I always uninstalled the HP software and it works every time without having to install anything else. Maybe because I’m used to the MacOS world but that should be the default first thing you try is do nothing and let the OS handle it.
• andy_ppp 4y 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 4y 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
    • wildrhythms 4y 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.
  • numpad0 4y ago
    It’s expensive stuff that gets finicky, because cheap devices are identical to one another in layers 2 and up.
• guzik 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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!
• deleted 4y ago
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• gc22browsing 4y 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 4y 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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• _zfxr 4y 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.
• blackhaz 4y 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 4y ago
    The image you're taking about is the cover art for that album, right?
    • blackhaz 4y ago
      Yes...
      • jknutson 4y ago
        A likely story. This is a safe place pal, we’re all friends here..
    • mort96 4y 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.
• kyaghmour 4y 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 4y ago
    Is that because of regulation? What’s the concern of having open source for RF firmwares?
    • kyaghmour 4y ago
      Regulatory requirements and certification.
  • arein3 4y ago
    Is that a law? There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
    • doctor_lollipop 4y 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 4y 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)…
• _Algernon_ 4y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
• amelius 4y ago
  The same holds for USB.
  • oblio 4y 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 4y 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.
• iasay 4y 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 4y 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.
• QuarterReptile 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    A2DP doesn't support microphones. You're thinking of Headset Profile (HSP). That's the low-latency profile with mic support.
• DoingIsLearning 4y 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 4y 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.
    • DoingIsLearning 4y 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 4y 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.
      • knorker 4y ago
        And for those who don't know, that's not actually a particularly big difference. The inverse square law means this is just the difference between 1 meter and 3 meters. And your WiFi has no problems at 3 meters from the AP.
  • knorker 4y 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".
• causi 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  I had started to like my bluetooth headset, but then one day it stopped working during a presentation. Never again.
• byteflip 4y ago
  As someone who worked on Bluetooth in consumer electronics for years the title gave me a good laugh.
• kretaceous 4y 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 4y ago
    Ok I’ll reply with https://xkcd.com/2055/ 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 4y ago
  Is Bluetooth a secure comms protocol? Admittedly, no. But is it a reliable, easy-to-use protocol fit for mass consumption? Also, no.
• knorker 4y 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.
• meltyness 4y 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.
  • knorker 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  > he himself uses it seamlessly — some "70% of the time." 70% of the time, it works every time.
• FerretFred 4y 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 4y 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.
• jeffnappi 4y 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/1838151 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/18...
  • listless 4y 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.
    • jeffnappi 4y 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.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        That's what we have governments for. Individual companies trying to set standards often just lose business to the companies they interop with, and the one that does best among the interoperable defects (or extends and extinguishes.) Instead of making individual companies strategize around interop, you just impose it. The real problem is that this doesn't work with regulatory capture, because you need people formulating standards who have both independence and expertise.
• yndoendo 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
• m3kw9 4y ago
  1 word: unreliability
• grumple 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    • deepsun 4y 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.
      • caleb-allen 4y ago
        That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds. Somebody who is barely technologically literate will understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly what the abstraction should do. Communicate something simply at the cost of precision.
• toxik 4y 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 4y 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.
• scifibestfi 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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?
• rootusrootus 4y 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.
• dkarl 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  My door, yes my front door is controlled by a bluetooth device. It's a horrible horrible experience.
• amichal 4y 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 4y 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-gain-co/clpapnmmlmecieknddelobgikompchkk/related?hl=en-US 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 4y ago
  Obligatory xkcd from 2018: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
• encryptluks2 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
• oort-cloud9 4y ago
• epx 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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_Peregrinus 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.