10 ms·

A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the

by moonleay 11mo ago

A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

cbsks 11mo ago
That is such a typical bug report to a large company. A user who spent a lot of time debugging and finding the root cause of an issue, and a few faceless peons at the large company spending a few minutes on it, realizing it’s not a priority, and abandoning it.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  And not a small bug either. This large an interoperability issue and it takes a nerd not in the employ of Google to fix their shit? This is why Apple's vertical integration makes it one of richest companies in the world. Google's only up there because of their success in that one business of theirs.
  - mhluongo 11mo ago
    Funny, I was under the impression that Apple's stuff is closed source, so no one outside their employ even could fix a similar issue?
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      What does Apple being Apple have to do with Google not paying somebody to work on getting Airpods, which presumably should conform to some Bluetooth spec, in order to get Airpods to work on Android?
      - catlikesshrimp 11mo ago
        >>...due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee. We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
    - butvacuum 11mo ago
      Apparently, android isn't fixing it either.
    - justinclift 11mo ago
      Bearing in mind that Apple does Open Source some stuff: https://opensource.apple.com/projects https://opensource.apple.com/projects They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too: * https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ * https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.
- almostgotcaught 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- netsharc 11mo ago
  Ah, when "open source" means begging an advertisement company to bless your code changes...
  - charcircuit 11mo ago
    It was a hack. An actual code change would be submitted via the gerrit and not buganizer. https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wip https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
    - IshKebab 11mo ago
      Yeah except nobody is going to put the effort in to do that because they know it will be ignored. I tried back in the day.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    Not really. There wasn’t a true patch attempt submitted, as far as I can see. There was some helpful info about how commenting out a couple lines could work around the issue, but doing a real engineering evaluation to check spec compliance and make sure it’s all covered in the Bluetooth testing infrastructure is a much bigger task.
Andrex 11mo ago
I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up. Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.
- SilverElfin 11mo ago
  Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.
  - baby_souffle 11mo ago
    > Flash was great. It had a great number of CVEs, you mean? _modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
    - ezst 11mo ago
      By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at. In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
  - Spooky23 11mo ago
    Mercy. Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.
  - kalleboo 11mo ago
    Flash the authoring suite was great Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
  - 11mo ago
jmgao 11mo ago
It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that breaks in some other way means that you'd have to be entirely bug compatible with iOS's bluetooth implementation.
- itsnoone 11mo ago
  It not that hard to imagine Apple going out of their way to do something that would break functionality on Android, honestly. Although, I believe Fluoride also is to be blamed here because a simple timeout can not possible cause any issues (it seems that a timeout is there, but never called- at least from my tinkering). I am not planning to spend a single second tracing back the actual problem and suggesting a fix, given that Google just asked me to reproduce twice (!!) and did nothing about it.
- a13n 11mo ago
  is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
  - indentit 11mo ago
    Specifications are there for a reason... Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
    - helsinkiandrew 11mo ago
      You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
      - 11mo ago
WithinReason 11mo ago
Last 2 comments: > Need fix please > original engineers got laid off thats why
KolibriFly 11mo ago
Still, it's kind of amazing that one person hacked around both Apple's walled garden and Android's jank to make this work at all
- worldsavior 11mo ago
  It's not really hard to reverse engineer AirPods. Just watch the bluetooth communication between a mac and the AirPods, turn specific features on/off, see how it reacts, then replicate exactly. I wanted to do it myself but saw something like this already exists (librepods, previously called "Airpods like normal (aln)").
dotancohen 11mo ago
Any idea how much latency there is between the beginning of audio being played in an app, and it then coming out the headset? I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds. Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.
- frumiousirc 11mo ago
  > I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. 1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use. FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency. If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
    Thank you. I actually have since switched devices, but have not yet tested on the new device. The old device was a flagship phone, the Note 10 Lite. That phone served me well for four years, I'll test on the S24 Ultra that just replaced it. Thank you.
- AshamedCaptain 11mo ago
  This is your host idling the connection due to the silence. Just keep something playing (like a stream of almost-silence) on loop and you won't have this problem.
  - dotancohen 11mo ago

cbsks 11mo ago

That is such a typical bug report to a large company. A user who spent a lot of time debugging and finding the root cause of an issue, and a few faceless peons at the large company spending a few minutes on it, realizing it’s not a priority, and abandoning it.

fragmede 11mo ago
And not a small bug either. This large an interoperability issue and it takes a nerd not in the employ of Google to fix their shit? This is why Apple's vertical integration makes it one of richest companies in the world. Google's only up there because of their success in that one business of theirs.
- mhluongo 11mo ago
  Funny, I was under the impression that Apple's stuff is closed source, so no one outside their employ even could fix a similar issue?
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    What does Apple being Apple have to do with Google not paying somebody to work on getting Airpods, which presumably should conform to some Bluetooth spec, in order to get Airpods to work on Android?
    - catlikesshrimp 11mo ago
      >>...due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee. We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
  - butvacuum 11mo ago
    Apparently, android isn't fixing it either.
  - justinclift 11mo ago
    Bearing in mind that Apple does Open Source some stuff: https://opensource.apple.com/projects https://opensource.apple.com/projects They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too: * https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/ * https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ https://opensource.apple.com/releases/ I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.
almostgotcaught 11mo ago
[flagged]
netsharc 11mo ago
Ah, when "open source" means begging an advertisement company to bless your code changes...
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  It was a hack. An actual code change would be submitted via the gerrit and not buganizer. https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wip https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
  - IshKebab 11mo ago
    Yeah except nobody is going to put the effort in to do that because they know it will be ignored. I tried back in the day.
- Aurornis 11mo ago
  Not really. There wasn’t a true patch attempt submitted, as far as I can see. There was some helpful info about how commenting out a couple lines could work around the issue, but doing a real engineering evaluation to check spec compliance and make sure it’s all covered in the Bluetooth testing infrastructure is a much bigger task.

Andrex 11mo ago

I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up. Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.

SilverElfin 11mo ago
Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.
- baby_souffle 11mo ago
  > Flash was great. It had a great number of CVEs, you mean? _modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
  - ezst 11mo ago
    By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at. In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  Mercy. Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.
- kalleboo 11mo ago
  Flash the authoring suite was great Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
- 11mo ago

jmgao 11mo ago

It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that breaks in some other way means that you'd have to be entirely bug compatible with iOS's bluetooth implementation.

itsnoone 11mo ago
It not that hard to imagine Apple going out of their way to do something that would break functionality on Android, honestly. Although, I believe Fluoride also is to be blamed here because a simple timeout can not possible cause any issues (it seems that a timeout is there, but never called- at least from my tinkering). I am not planning to spend a single second tracing back the actual problem and suggesting a fix, given that Google just asked me to reproduce twice (!!) and did nothing about it.
a13n 11mo ago
is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
- indentit 11mo ago
  Specifications are there for a reason... Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
  - helsinkiandrew 11mo ago
    You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
    - 11mo ago

WithinReason 11mo ago

Last 2 comments: > Need fix please > original engineers got laid off thats why

KolibriFly 11mo ago

Still, it's kind of amazing that one person hacked around both Apple's walled garden and Android's jank to make this work at all

worldsavior 11mo ago
It's not really hard to reverse engineer AirPods. Just watch the bluetooth communication between a mac and the AirPods, turn specific features on/off, see how it reacts, then replicate exactly. I wanted to do it myself but saw something like this already exists (librepods, previously called "Airpods like normal (aln)").

dotancohen 11mo ago

Any idea how much latency there is between the beginning of audio being played in an app, and it then coming out the headset? I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds. Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.

frumiousirc 11mo ago
> I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. 1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use. FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency. If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  Thank you. I actually have since switched devices, but have not yet tested on the new device. The old device was a flagship phone, the Note 10 Lite. That phone served me well for four years, I'll test on the S24 Ultra that just replaced it. Thank you.
AshamedCaptain 11mo ago
This is your host idling the connection due to the silence. Just keep something playing (like a stream of almost-silence) on loop and you won't have this problem.
- dotancohen 11mo ago