8 ms·

Ask HN: Bluetooth kinda sucks. Why don't we have something better?

135 points by zachallaun 4y ago

There was a recent, highly upvoted article about the pains of Bluetooth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32162131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32162131 Summarizing only a tiny fraction of the complaints: - Connecting can make devices do weird stuff (play default songs, etc.) - Pairing multiple devices leads to unpredictable behavior (random switching, switching when you don't mean to) - Can't connect multiple headsets to one device (why do my wife and I need to share earbuds watching a movie on a plane?) - Can't connect multiple devices to one headset (why can't I listen to music on my computer but still get calls from my phone?) - ... Why don't we have something better already? I'm sure the answer spans a number of different fields/challenges. Standardization, security, adoption, regulation. Are there ongoing efforts to create a new protocol that solves for the problems so apparent with Bluetooth? Are there specific (seemingly) insurmountable roadblocks to improving the status quo? Asking from pure curiosity. And because I spent 5 minutes getting something to correctly pair this morning.

baybal2 4y ago
david927 4y ago
There's a long list of comments in that thread discussing "why" it's the case, with most simply saying "it's difficult." I disagree. I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate. It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. We think of technical innovation as a straight line forward but sometimes it goes back the other way.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  My experience is that better quality Bluetooth headsets can handle being paired to multiple devices, cheaper ones will drive you crazy. I have these on my head right now at the office https://www.v-moda.com/us/en/products/crossfade2-wireless https://www.v-moda.com/us/en/products/crossfade2-wireless and I have a pair of these at home https://www.poly.com/us/en/products/headsets/voyager/voyager-focus-uc https://www.poly.com/us/en/products/headsets/voyager/voyager... I wound up getting these after having been deeply dissatisfied with Bluetooth headphones and I think they've been a very good investment. My current complaining is about the host devices. My work laptop is a thin Dell Latitude, the performance of Bluetooth is great on that, in a metal frame office building I am able to listen to audio in the bathroom a considerable distance from my office. My personal computer is a huge Alienware (also Dell). Bluetooth is OK when I am sitting directly in front of it but if I go to the next room it only works if I am careful to tilt my head the right way. I think it's a poor radio and/or a badly designed antenna. Apple devices on the other hand seem to refuse to play music over WiFi with Bluetooth. Most people don't seem aware of this because they use iPhones with cellular connections but I can't do it with my iPad and we always have visitors to our cell phone dead spot (most of upstate NY) try to play streaming music from their phone to bluetooth speakers and fail.
- noir_lord 4y ago
  > It's sad that my family uses the available Bluetooth devices less than if there was a wire we could just plug into. I specifically buy wired gaming headphones, wired mice and wired keyboards - if there is any sensible wired option I'll take it every time, I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop. Wireless stuff is just less reliable and always seems to throw issues when you really need it to work.
  - david927 4y ago
    We specifically got a printer that only can connect via a USB cable and it's been perfect. But that's not the answer. Why? It's not that much data. WiFi doesn't seem to have some of these problems. Why is Bluetooth so shit?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - rand49an 4y ago
      Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        >Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases. That is probably true but part of the problem is that, as I recall from years of Intel Developer Forums, Bluetooth was originally focused on mobile headsets and there were a bunch of other wireless technologies floating around for other purposes. However, for whatever historical reasons, Bluetooth through a number of iterations pretty much ended up gobbling up all the non-WiFi wireless use cases (other than cellular and NFC of course). And it arguably wasn't really suited for a lot of them.
  - zachallaun 4y ago
    One of my favorite wireless devices is a Logitech gaming mouse (G903) that I use with a mousepad that is also a charging mat. It uses a low-latency proprietary wireless protocol: https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/innovation/lightspeed.html
- rhacker 4y ago
  I don't think you explained why you disagree. If it's difficult, why is that wrong, why do you disagree?
  - david927 4y ago
    I think it's the same reason why so much of our software is poor quality: taking something from "works" to "works well" is a cost sink. It will cost you and yet doesn't add much to the bottom line to compensate. Basically, there's a gap between "it works" and "it's effortless" and that's a pricey gap that doesn't net you a lot in return financially.
- stinkledinkle 4y ago
  I think this hits the nail on the head. A device developer will develop a bluetooth gadget. They test it, it works, but they know it's not great. But they know that when a consumer buys it, none of that matters as long as they buy the product and don't return it. So the trick is to make sure you have a nice feature set which works well enough so that you can gaslight consumers into thinking the failure is their fault. So if it only works half the time, that's fine. Just tell them to turn their bluetooth off and on or to reboot their device. It'll probably fix it and now they think they are at fault.
SavageBeast 4y ago
I have spent some time wondering this same question - what I came to - Bluetooth is most likely a protocol spec where by any and all action the protocol can take is defined. The implementations are left to the vendors such that for one Bluetooth spec we get N physical/software implementations. So we're always taking a device from vendor X and trying to pair it with implementations from vendor Y and Z. We're now talking about 3 different versions of the same spec here more or less. Cross vendor implementation of software is where I see a big potential for problems. As a protocol specification Id imagine all this has been thoroughly thought out. Where the rubber meets the road in the software, its probably not been so faithfully implemented (it works with my laptop - SHIP IT!). Just my thinking on the backside of finally getting a new phone paired with my car.
pwinnski 4y ago
Most of the problems seem to be poor implementations, because what's the motivation for, say, a car company to get Bluetooth exactly right? How many people buy cars based on the speed with which Bluetooth connects? As evidence, sticking with a single vendor means I don't have weird stuff happen, and can in fact connect multiple pairs of AirPods to a single Apple TV unit so my partner and I can watch together in outward silence. I still cannot, as far as I know, connect a single pair of AirPods to more than one device, but that doesn't seem like a feature anybody would have considered when initial developing the BlueTooth spec. Perhaps such a feature will come soon, at least with a single vendor solution like Apple's.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Apple demands a hefty price for this compatibility, and its purely within their tiny ecosystem. Which is OK, they do premium hardware and software, some of it top of the notch. Some other manufacturers are trying this but they are nowhere near this level of quality. The problem I have are the parts where they are not top of their game, ie earbuds. If your only requirement is good call quality then their products can be titled best if paired with ie iphone. But I don't care about that at all. I bought ones which sound for music significantly better than airpods pro, have much better battery life (also their case has better battery for recharging and overall stamina). When yet better ones come (or I lose mine), I will go again for the best within my budget, easily from another manufacturer since brand loyalty is rather meaningless fluff for me, only quality of specific product matters. But - I can't connect them to any apple product via high quality variations of codecs. So instead of using aptX HD to play my flacs in phone, I would have to resort to some basic implementation and effectively cut off some quality of those flacs. I am sure some wouldn't mind, but I do. Hence you do shopping around, because in +- apple price bracket you have tons of options for quality hardware, be it notebooks, tablets, different headphones and so on. This opinion doesn't take into account things like apple's stand on privacy on phones, which for many puts them above rest of the market. Suffice to say for me its more a case of clever marketing than actual proper security of such an important device, especially since I am not an US person and some US laws see me as sub-human, thus US 3-letter agencies act accordingly. But maybe I am completely wrong on this part, it would actually be great since I am already spending same dollars, just for other brands. Just haven't seen a single solid proof of that, and quite a few in contrary.
vel0city 4y ago
As for multiple headsets to one device, a lot of devices have challenges playing a certain audio stream to multiple output devices. For instance, my laptop has a speaker and my monitor has a speaker. There's no default way in Windows to play the same audio out on both of these outputs. I would need software to emulate a sound device and end up duplicating the stream to both other sound devices to target both outputs at once. Its been a while but I think that's also true on MacOS, its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux distros, its true on Android. You might have issues outputting to multiple headsets depending on your chipset, but the first level limitation is really more on the operating system side of things. As for "can't connect multiple devices to one headset", as mentioned by others you can do this if you get the right hardware. I have a few headsets which support multipoint.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > its true for the defaults of a lot of Linux Not anymore. New distributions have moved to pipewire audio, so since about this year you can open qjackctl, Carla or any of the audio routing apps and drag and drop audio from a chosen app to any number of outputs. (not sure if you'd count not built into the traybar mixer panel as default or not)
  - vel0city 4y ago
    Not all distributions have made the change for the defaults to pipewire. Ubuntu 22.10 (the latest LTS release of Ubuntu) still uses ALSA as the default, as just a quick example. It can still be changed easily enough. And yeah, there are apps like qjackctl and Carla and others which do let you do this kind of mixing. But yeah, I'm talking about the basic sound settings that most users are going to instinctually mess with and make quick changes. As mentioned, there are software stacks that will let you mix inputs and outputs on Windows using synthetic devices, but that's not the natively exposed tools present on a standard install. On most modern Linux distros, you could get it done with some fancy CLI work out of the box, or you'll want to install tools like qjackctl.
    - viraptor 4y ago
Jenk 4y ago
Why did Betamax lose out to VHS? Why did MiniDisc never take off? Why does the internet still rely on JavaScript? From my sideline perspective it's probably because Bluetooth was developed without knowing how successful and expansive its use would become. It was developed by mobile phone companies to connect wireless earpieces to mobile telephones, and that was it. The entire scope of the product that is Bluetooth. They didn't even expect it to be used for stereo (or more channels) audio, _just_ for telephony ear pieces. It has since been used for many things that it just wasn't engineered to do. However, it _is_ (or rather has become) a rather ubiquitous protocol through lack of alternatives, and now is the must-use option for any hardware vendors wanting to connect to nearby devices. Pragmatism/apathy.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  I worked in telco in the early 2000s when Bluetooth hype was at its peak, and that's just not true: if anything, Bluetooth was hailed as the Next Big Thing because it would enable "Personal Area Networks" (PAN), a now all-but-forgotten buzzword. But don't take my word for it, here's the IEEE in 1999: Examples of applications include Collaborative Maintenance, Mobile Worker, Medical Sensing, Data Synchronization, etc. Examples of devices, which can be networked, include Computers, PDA/HPCs, printers, microphones, speakers, bar code readers, sensors, displays, Pagers, and Cellular & PCS Phones. https://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/par/5C.html https://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/15/pub/par/5C.html Funnily enough, it's the very last thing they mentioned, cellular phones, that ended up being the primary user! Pedantic note: IEEE 802.15 was a grab-bag of various PAN proposals, with Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) really the only one to go mainstream, although low-rate networks (802.15.4) like ZigBee were eventually adopted in the IoT world as well.
  - causi 4y ago
    Indeed. I well remember spending $150 for a ThinkOutside folding bluetooth keyboard and mouse for my PDA in 2005 and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. Shame you can't get a modern folding keyboard with that build quality.
    - 4y ago
navjack27 4y ago
For audio devices like speakers or headphones I've thought about an idea for playing music at least. You could have the host device send the playback device the files and the playback device would play the file locally and it would be synchronized with some sort of a timestamping routine between the host and the playback device. There wouldn't be any need to transfer data in real time in high bandwidth between them so you could have lossless audio. Being able to play back a majority of audio codecs shouldn't be all that hard or license encumbered. Even if you take a shortcut method and just transcode everything on the fly to flac. You maybe only need to store the current song that you're playing back. Heck you could extend this so it doesn't need to be built into the headphones or the speakers as a protocol and it could just be like one of those portable Bluetooth things that you can buy that you could plug any audio device in except it uses this new thing. But the touch on all of the things that you brought up in your original post related to like real time audio. I swear there are implementations where multiple headsets on one device or multiple devices to one headset do exist. I don't think the problem has much to do with Bluetooth as a standard even though the standard is extremely complicated I think it all has to do with software and implementation on the part of the host device like the computer or the phone and the playback device. Like if there was a standard reference device example for both of these things that did everything correctly I'm pretty sure all of the things that you brought up work. Although I would like to be corrected on this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
schaefer 4y ago
We do have something better! And we’ve had it for decades. It’s a cable.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Wireless wins for all my uses. I can easily bike with my Beats wireless headphones. I can easily run. I can get up from the computer while watching a YouTube show or if I'm in the middle of a video chat and still want to listen in while I make a quick tea or something in the kitchen. I've literally gone swimming with my wireless headphones. Heads up front crawl, but still. These things are awesome. Why on earth would I want to be shackled with my computer or phone or worry about tripping on a cable while exercising? To me the hard part is finding the right headphones. Sound quality isn't perfect, but a reliable bluetooth connection and easy ergonomics for skipping a song are near-perfect on these Beats.
  - cronix 4y ago
    And it's really fun buying a new pair every x years purely because the battery has degraded and not really replaceable. I quit buying them purely because they fairly rapidly (compared to wired headphones) become e-waste, for the slight conveniences you mentioned. All those things including swimming were done with wired headphones too, with maybe the exception of walking into the other room to get your tea.
    - drstewart 4y ago
      That's funny, because I've had to buy more pairs of wired cables because they frayed than I ever did wireless headphones because the battery died.
      - asdff 4y ago
        Buy junk get junk. I have a 10 year old set of sony wired headphones. Reference tier sound still. For blutooth, how many of these devices allow the users to replace batteries to make it to 10 years and ongoing as I have done with my headphones? Bang and Oulfson afaik is it but you have to shell out half a grand for one of their headphone sets, plus the battery is proprietary so if the company gets some MBA holders at the helm they will change it slightly between generations and not sell older replacements, to force you to buy new and not leave money on the table.
duped 4y ago
Have you ever bought a product because "the Bluetooth integration is so good?" I'm sure a few people have. But it's not like you choose a car or phone because of it.
- amelius 4y ago
  Perhaps certification is the solution then. You can't sell Bluetooth unless it's been certified.
- zemo 4y ago
  I bought a stereo receiver because it has bluetooth up and down and I preferred that to the proprietary protocol used by Sonos. I actually bought a Sonos first and returned it because I hated it so much. The latency makes it completely unusable for half of the desired applications though. So … not “so good” but “the one thing with Bluetooth that I found at the time”.
- david927 4y ago
  That was my argument above. It's something Adam Smith didn't realize: Capitalism optimizes to discomfort. Over the decades, airlines have found more ways to put more seats in the same space, more ways to optimize a full plane even if it means more people are bumped, etc. They've made more money but it has also made flying a much poorer experience. Not patently horrible, but not comfortable either.
- CivBase 4y ago
  When was the last time you saw a review that audited the Bluetooth implementation on a device? I couldn't even make that kind of purchasing decision if I wanted to.
  - duped 4y ago
    I get the point but I actually see this all the time in tech reviews on YouTube. Granted they don't go beyond "it works" unless the pairing experience is notably terrible
- neilc 4y ago
giantg2 4y ago
Are any of these problems actually Bluetooth problems? It seems the data protocol works just fine. It appears to me that the various devices just handle the associated tasks poorly. Eg you could take a call on your phone while playing music on your computer, if your phone had the functionality to send the music via Bluetooth and keep the phone conversation separate.
- carrychains 4y ago
  Exactly. At this point, it's not the protocol. It's devices with shitty implementations of the protocol.
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    If one vendor gets the protocol implementation wrong, that's a shitty vendor. If every vendor gets the protocol implementation wrong, it's a shitty protocol. Part of what makes good protocol design is knowing how to design something that can actually be implemented well by real humans.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    The protocol itself sucks. For example, do you want to listen to have game audio and have a mic active? This is basically the main use case for Bluetooth and what are your options? CVSD and mSBC, both of which have notoriously poor quality. If you were lucky and bought fancier hardware, you could marginally improve things with FastStream or AptX-LL, a couple of vendor-specific, non-standards compliant hacks that were finicky to use at best. As of 2022, there isn't even a solution, only the hope that BT5 might be have standardized support for marginally acceptable quality, provided vendors actually implement it. Of course, you can't buy BT5 hardware today and vendors have entirely ignored large parts of the spec before, so that's not exactly a great selling point.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
We don't have anything better because radio silicon is a terrible industry to be in. The amount of institutional knowledge and capital required is insane, and the network effects on the protocol are massive. The flip side is that consumer electronics manufacturers are horrendously cheap when it comes to BOM cost. If your component doesn't directly provide a feature list item consumers will recognize, it's not going in the device. Similarly, consumers don't care about radio protocols that aren't universal. This leads to a chicken and egg problem where manufacturers won't introduce new things, and when they do consumers won't use new things because new things don't stick around. As for why BT sucks, it's a combination of very few chipset manufacturers (at one point it was basically just Broadcom and CSR, now both part of Qualcomm) that suck at software owning the entire market, legacy protocol design decisions constraining future capabilities (this is why audio sucks), and simply being too complicated.
zemo 4y ago
it’s just so device-specific. My JBL speaker, aftershokz bone conducting headphones, and iPhone all play nicely and I don’t have any problems. My Windows machines consistently have problems with bluetooth, but poor quality is a standard of the Windows experience so it doesn’t surprise me. My Sony stereo receiver is always a nightmare to pair. Honestly the JBL Charge speaker has the best and simplest solution to this: it just lets two devices pair to it simultaneously.
davidhyde 4y ago
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is responsible for publishing all the Bluetooth specs and you can download them here: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/ https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/ Notice that everything appears to be there: very detailed specs and information about testing. However, when you try to implement one of these specs you quickly realize that you cannot do it with the spec alone. You need example code, base implementations, test suite software and test data to build conformant software. Unfortunately, the Bluetooth SIG hides these resources behind a membership wall. Guess what happens then? You get lots of implementations of these specs that are a little bit off and don't handle all edge cases. If I were to wave a magic wand I would like to see Bluetooth SIG change to a donation based financial model and for them to make all resources freely available. Right now they make money from branding, certification and country club membership fees. No wonder the ecosystem is one big tire fire.
- natch 4y ago
  So, you are suggesting that the Bluetooth SIG did just a fine job with the technology, no problems there, and that people like Apple don't see fit to use the money in their budget to cough up a membership fee? Seeing as how it is Apple devices on which I often encounter pairing difficulties. Super convenient for the SIG that they can point fingers like this (I wonder if that's why they set it up as you describe, ugh), but I would be skeptical of any implication that Apple doesn't pay a membership fee.
  - wvenable 4y ago
    Are you sure the problem is Apple and not the device on the other side?
    - natch 4y ago
      Both sides are Apple, fully updated, expert user, in close proximity, good charge, blah blah blah. Maybe it’s me… or… just maybe… Bluetooth does have room for improvement.
robotnikman 4y ago
There is an xkcd for this https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- gibspaulding 4y ago
  I was thinking of this one: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
  - jvalencia 4y ago
    I've had the endless connected loop more times than I can count!
greenthrow 4y ago
Only some of the issues you list are inherent to Bluetooth. Others are a result of trying to balance doing the right thing for the 80% case which results in sub optimal experiences for edge cases. I don't see a lot of evidence that just coming up with a new standard would address many of these. The main issue with Bluetooth is the sound quality sucks. That is actually due to the Bluetooth standard.
fallingfrog 4y ago
Yeah, the bluetooth in my car is so hopelessly pathological that I always turn off the bluetooth in my phone and turn the internal phone speakers up if I want to use the maps app. If I don't, first it will immediately pick some song at random on my phone and play it at full volume without my asking. If the radio is turned off, it will still connect to the phone, which disables the phone speakers, but then it will not make any sound at all. Or it will connect up but will turn the volume all the way down which also results in no sound. Sometimes it will randomly connect to various devices in the car. Sometimes if you plug in the phone to recharge but leave the bluetooth on it will turn off the phone speakers but also not make any sound from the car speakers. It's bad. The whole system is actively hostile to the user.
- themanmaran 4y ago
  Car bluetooth is a whole different world of terrible software. I wish there was a standardized interface that car manufacturers would use, rather than hand-rolling their own.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
1. It's basically good enough, despite its problems. 2. It has brand-name recognition. 3. People who need it know that its the "wireless thing" for audio and music, often without their being able to articulate precisely what it does. 4. It's baked into enough hardware that a competing technology would struggle to enter the market.
rchaud 4y ago
I'd been using BT for the past decade as a wireless receiver for audio or mouse/KB. It's only very recently that I discovered that you could use it to transmit files from Device A to Device B. No middleman app or cloud sync service needed! Considering how awful USB file sync is between Mac OS and Android, I don't even break out the cable to transfer files anymore. The downside is that transmission speeds are very slow, approx. 5 seconds to transfer 1 MB. That's fine for EPUBs and text-heavy PDFs, but not for anything bigger.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Back in high school we'd transfer photos, ringtones, and games between phones through Bluetooth. It worked reasonably well for the time. Photos from those early camera phones weren't very large, wallpapers were less than like 250x150 pixels usually, and lots of games were a meg or less.
- ecliptik 4y ago
  This was one of the original uses for Bluetooth - replacing PDA cradles, serial/USB cables, and IR for syncing things like contacts, email, calendars, etc. There were articles in the early aughts about the "failure of bluetooth" [1] since syncing with 802.11 to a network was a better option. 1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/bye-bye-bluetooth/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/bye-bye-bluetooth/
  - abhaynayar 4y ago
    > aughts Nice, never knew what to call that decade before.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  You can use wi-fi direct for that now with decent speeds. The only issue is it is so hard to discover! On Android you find a file and then Share -> Nearby. The recipient might need to fiddle in settings to enable it.
  - rchaud 4y ago
molasses 4y ago
I abandoned bluetooth early on, because I kept having issues. Stubborn pairing is still a pain. For music, I bought a DLNA renderer (more like a Chromecast), and just assumed that lots of software could remotely talk to it. But about the only software that almost works with it is something with a poor UI from yesteryear on Android. And music service support is hit and miss. So I'm edging towards Bluetooth now. That said, yesterday I resorted to CDs. And today, I've jacked a spare phone into an auxiliary port. And I won't use my phone for Bluetooth music mainly because if I walk out the room or want to take a call it all goes tits up. I've had Bluetooth on Debian Linux on my Thinkpad for years, and different releases have been hit and miss for things like file transfer. And address book syncing. And that's not confined to Linux either. When it works... It does feel like magic. Really I want to easily route sound from one app to a particular device or devices with easy remote management. Voice control is a bit hit and miss. But hands free remote is a good idea. UI is very esoteric, like when you are offered a list of Bluetooth services. A phone I had would offer itself as a remote device or something, but I never figured out how and what it did. Or the worry that your phone might turn into a data access point accidentally.
jeroenhd 4y ago
For what it does, Bluetooth works fine in my opinion. We expect Bluetooth to work like magic and to follow all the standards but we also expect it to work around issues we have with the standard (codecs, interference, etc.) because we don't want a bad experience. You can't have both! If you stick to the stuff that works with every device (no automated switching, no proprietary codecs, no out of spec bandwidth and timing requirements) Bluetooth works quite well in my experience. Only when companies try to invent their own solution or very cheap, crappy, standards avoiding devices get involved does Bluetooth really start to break down. Another issue is driver stability. I swear to god, Windows just hates Bluetooth. Somehow, Windows drivers for even common chipsets are worse than Linux drivers. On the other hand, on some Linux kernels, having Bluetooth on while putting a device in sleep can cause a kernel panic... It's all so unstable. There's nothing in the spec that says your software must hang and become unresponsive when an (un)pairing attempt fails, but here we are! As for some of your complaints: - connecting devices will make them behave like they were made to do. If they play default music, that sounds like a product feature that's off, not a protocol problem. - pairing multiple devices is not governed by the spec (nor should it be, in my opinion). What a device will do depends on what makes sense for a device; a party speaker may want to connect to whatever device is available, but headphones or a keyboard prefer connecting to the device they were last connected to. Again, this is more of a device implementation feature, not really a protocol thing. - connecting multiple headsets to a device is possible. In fact, I've done so in the past. You're limited by the throughput of your Bluetooth version (quite high, these days!) and any interference, but there's nothing preventing a device from playing to two devices at once. In Linux you can create a dummy device to stream to multiple audio endpoints through some config or command lines; on other platforms you'll need custom applications. This is an OS design issue, not a protocol issue, and it's no different from playing audio to both your TV and your headphones (quite useful for watching movies together with people with hearing aids and the like!) - Can't connect multiple devices to one headset: this is a protocol issue. Devices join a piconet which needs to be synchronised and is controlled by a single master device. In theory that master device could be your headphones, with both other devices acting as clients, but in practice this is often not the case. Such a system can be quite finicky to work with when one or both devices go out of range or if multiple devices try to send high definition audio over the same channel at the same time. Like all things Bluetooth, I've often wondered why WiFi Direct hasn't been more of a success. It'll eat more power, but it solves so many issues with Bluetooth, especially with modern 5.2GHz WiFi. For battery life purposes we'll be stuck with Bluetooth for a while, but I'd like to see WiFi Direct get a second chance for sharing files. Hell, it could even work as a cross platform Airdrop alternative (though Apple will obviously never join in).
soheil 4y ago
Another way to look at it is that BT is such a successful technology that it lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of devices that would simply not exist was it not for BT. It means that with any technology we would have the same problems, lots of cheaply made devices with half ass implementation.
k4ch0w 4y ago
You know, I think if you look in the home automation space you'll see a lot of interesting protocols in the works. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Matter. I think people are working on this problem for the IOT space. Bluetooth is really a strong easy to support protocol and BLE is also an amazing feat when it comes to battery life. Terribly boring to reverse engineer though. I think you also see it more because phones support it by default. I think a lot of the time it can be devices that implement the protocols poorly because I share your pain with my airpods max. However, I have a pair of a bluetooth headphones that have been amazing for 5 years.
swamp40 4y ago
I'm pretty sure Apple got some tweaks put into the Bluetooth chips they use to help out with some of the connection reliability issues. Put in at the bare metal level before the stack so as to avoid breaking the "standard". Apple has also used out-of-band pairing mechanisms to enhance the customer experience. But again, there is only so much they can do. There are many problems built into the standard and so there was only so much they could do. Ironically, the standard itself is preventing better experiences. It's been over 10 years now since BLE came out. Many companies have crashed and burned or abandoned products or just accepted poor user experiences in those 10 years. The Bluetooth SIG is a monstrosity. I bet you would have to break off to fix the problems in under 10 years. And the SIG would probably sue to prevent that.
- swamp40 4y ago
  Having said all that, BLE is an amazing technology and is improving slowly. You can track your dog or purse or car anywhere in the world, all using a CR2032 coin cell battery that will last for years. It provides your phone with an easy extension into the real world, which has thousands of use cases.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure Apple got some tweaks put into the Bluetooth chips they use to help out with some of the connection reliability issues. Put in at the bare metal level before the stack so as to avoid breaking the "standard". I'm not a Bluetooth expert but that doesn't sound right. Surely the vast majority of BT complexity in a modern stack is in the software? Also, if you're "breaking the standard" in a closed system like in an Apple product, who cares if you're doing it in software or hardware?
  - swamp40 4y ago
    Look up Apple's H1 and W1 chips. They improved it while remaining "Bluetooth compatible". Bluetooth has too big of a name recognition to just go your own way. Thousands of popular products.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
oneplane 4y ago
Multiple reasons (as outlined partially by others): - It is incredibly hard to make something so versatile work well everywhere, all the time, for everything - It is even harder to get multiple stakeholders to do this consistently - And it harder still to do this if the business case doesn't allow for (long-term) support This is mostly a business problem and not really a technical problem. Wi-Fi is similarly pretty badly implemented, for similar reasons, but the upside is that it doesn't have a billion specialised profiles, it generally just has to pretend it's encapsulating network frames the same way ethernet does. As long as it can do that, people can make use of it.
Pxtl 4y ago
Honestly, the latency is the biggest problem for me. I've got a bluetooth game controller and headset for my phone (Pixel 4a), but the latency makes using them both at once impossible. If I switch to a wired headset the controller bluetooth gets better and the game becomes playable.
layer8 4y ago
> Can't connect multiple headsets to one device Bluetooth 5.0 allows connecting two headsets simultaneously.
mmphosis 4y ago
We do. Maybe too many alternatives. USB with some non Bluetooth radio connection, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Fiber, and more. I was setting up a shared connection recently, and there was the option to use FireWire.
user3939382 4y ago
I can’t believe it works at all. Have you seen the spec? It’s thousands of pages. We can barely get small RFC implementations cross compatible on the web, how any of this stuff is actually interoperable is totally amazing to me.
asdff 4y ago
Honestly the 3.5mm jack is better technology. - connecting does nothing confusing, just changes default output speaker for most software - pairing multiple devices just needs a splitter then it works the same as pairing one device in terms of ux - can connect multiple headsets to one device - can connect multiple devices to one headset - can purchase replacement 3.5mm cables cheaply at any convenience store around the world - can repair this equipment yourself with soldering or even just a wire stripper and tape - doesn't need charging or any external power supply, everything from the connection to even the output speaker in the case of headphones is powered by the device which makes ux easier (just one thing to keep charged) - can use brand new equipment or decades old equipment all the same. my headphones are 10 years old and will last decades longer easily I have no reason to let go of my 3.5mm cables and adopt this inferior system.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I can stay seated on the couch and connect my phone to my stereo. It turns on the receiver and changes the input to Bluetooth upon connection. From there I can then play anything and control the volume on the stereo from my phone. All without needing to even get up from the couch, or potentially even needing to go into the room with the receiver. The receiver has good Bluetooth range. I can change the output to the speakers by the pool (albiet through the receiver app or from the receiver's remote or its face buttons) and take my phone pool-side. Then I can change the music (and the volume, once again) from my phone through just Bluetooth. Both of these are experiences where Bluetooth is better than a 3.5mm jack.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I guess that depends on how smooth your blutooth interfacing is. For bluetooth speaker's I've had , pairing means holding a button on the physical speaker and waiting for the phone to show up because for reasons the old connection listed on my iphone no longer works. This happens with my mac and a blutooth mouse too. sometimes I can't connect to it right away, I need to go through the discovery and pairing process again. the system in the car is junk too. It connects and starts playback automatically, but you have to manually press play on the car's stereo head unit to start getting sound from the device versus just the title and time info on the car's headunit screen. I'm glad this system works for you but for most things I've had the pleasure of using blutooth with, it's been awkward and clunky and slow compared to just grabbing a plug and shoving it into a hole and getting sound immediately, so I prefer the tried and true cable methods whenever possible. Nice that they are so much cheaper too. You'd probably get better sound for your money buying a vintage stereo than a modern one with bt shoehorned in.
zajio1am 4y ago
People who want reliable operations use wired connections (e.g. USB). People who prefer wireless are anyway accustomed to things that suck.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
IIRC the purpose of Bluetooth was to be a patented hardware approach to something, with the intention of it becoming a widespread standard of some kind. Most importantly, an extremely detailed and ambiguous foundation was established so that copyrighted implementations which would far outlast patents would continue to provide an income stream once the patent expired and the hardware was in the public domain. Just so happened to be an approach to short-range PC radio communication.
vkoskiv 4y ago
Even after the pairing hassle, every time I play music on my Apple AirPod Pros (that cost over 200€, btw (!!)) the first second or so of songs consistently sound like garbage. Evidently whatever transport they are using can't handle sudden changes in bitrate, and they have to use a lower quality for that bit. Absolutely crazy to imagine that this passed QA at Apple!
- mewpmewp2 4y ago
  I have PowerBeats Pro which also cost over €200. And the most annoying thing is that usually I have to attempt connecting them multiple times to get both pieces to work. Sometimes I have to put them inside box and take out multiple times. I'm not sure what is up with that. If it doesn't connect the first time and only finds one earpiece it will stop trying to find the other earpiece? Another major annoyance I had is, if I have them paired with both Android Phone and my MacBook, the Android Phone and I'm currently connected to them with MacBook, and I have my phone bluetooth on, my phone periodically will take over the connection. This may be the phone fault though, to constantly try and open the connection even if I didn't ask it to? Overall they are just plain frustration to use. And I've had to reset PowerBeats Pro's countless of times to have them work at all.
senectus1 4y ago
I use BT every single day. for 99% of my use cases it works just fine 99% of the time. I'd like more features but really on a pure consumer elevel. it works out of the box and does what i want fairly reliably.
rapjr9 4y ago
ANT+ is easier to develop for and has far fewer issues and was available at the same time as Bluetooth, so we had something better: https://www.thisisant.com/consumer/ant-101/what-is-ant/ https://www.thisisant.com/consumer/ant-101/what-is-ant/ But phone manufacturers opted for Bluetooth instead. Go ask them why. Sony still supports ANT+ on their phones, but it's mostly only used to connect to fitness equipment (which has also mostly moved to Bluetooth because it is what most phones support.)
Amy_W 4y ago
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simonh 4y ago

I make an exception for ear buds, because the utility of being able to stand up, and walk around with my hands free and unencumbered by a tether while on a call, is just so great. It helps that Air Pods are among the best implementation there is, but even they are not perfect. I had to disable automatic device switching or they would occasionally get confused and drop the connection to the current device.

tehjoker 4y ago
i just thread the wire under my shirt, it's pretty similar and you can take the earbuds off and they just hang there
- prmoustache 4y ago
  When I am on a videocall with my coworkers and want to fill my glass with water, I like being able to go to the kitchen without having to undock and drag my laptop all over the house. Same if I need to find something in a shelf. That is pretty much the only reason I use bt headset.
  - asdff 4y ago
    I'm surprised your bluetooth headphones don't just cut out when you do that. My experience is blutooth has a range of like 30 feet and that quickly diminishes when you introduce walls into the equation.
- vel0city 4y ago
  That's kind of OK if you're connecting to a mobile device in your pocket, but there are lots of things I use headphones with. I might be connected to my phone, I might be connected to my laptop, I might be connected to my desktop. Maybe my phone is in my pocket, maybe its on the desk, maybe its on my coffee table across the room. My wireless headphones work all throughout the house without having to have a device physically on me. I can be listening to a call on my computer, get up and walk to the kitchen, make a snack, and walk back to my office and never miss a beat.
navbaker 4y ago
I actually have to use wired ear buds with my gaming laptop since I found wireless interferes with also using a wireless Xbox controller.

bee_rider 4y ago

Do you have other non-Apple devices with which you encounter pairing difficulties? My experience with Bluetooth headphones was that on an iPhone they were occasionally annoying, while on Linux they were quite poor and on Windows they were more like a practical joke. This would have been like 4-5 years ago though, maybe all the stacks have been improved.

JLCarveth 4y ago
Honestly my linux desktop (Ubuntu 22.04) is where I run into the fewest issues regarding my bluetooth headphones. I've never had an issue connecting to them.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Hmm. The issues that come to mind are annoying pairing (Arch -- probably my fault, too manual) and some weird random disconnects on Ubuntu, but that might be some power-saving issue specific to my chip. So maybe I just got unlucky random outcomes.
- ikeboy 4y ago
  I've had issues where every other time I connect my Sony XM5 to Ubuntu 22.04, it decides to use HFP instead of A2DP which has significantly worse audio quality for music. I need to reset Bluetooth to fix it. None of the solutions online for disabling this "helpful" feature work.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Heh, that was the same issue that made me give up on desktop Linux (though with the XM3) and go back to Windows/Mac... three years ago. It's just never going to get priority because it doesn't have the marketshare. Sony doesn't care about Linux and Canonical doesn't care about Sony. If I were you, I'd consider an external bluetooth adapter that supports A2DP and connects to the 3.5mm plug on your computer, like this one: https://aluratek.com/universal-bluetooth-optical-audio-receiver-and-transmitter-with-bluetooth-five https://aluratek.com/universal-bluetooth-optical-audio-recei... Look for AptX low-latency support too if you care about audio lag (for movies or games).
  - felurx 4y ago
    This was quite an annoyance for me too. I discovered/noticed two things, but I'm on Manjaro, so YMMV: Whether A2DP or HFP is used can be controlled by changing the profile (or whatever it's called) of the audio device, in the audio settings. Take a look in the settings where you can change volume per app and all that good stuff, and try to see if there's some dropdown that lets you pick between Headset and Headphone, and all that. Second thing: The actual default behaviour seems to be to use the profile that was used last time. But for me, whenever MS Teams is running, it decides that the correct thing is to switch it to Headset mode, because Microsoft knows what you want better than you do, and you want the option that produces shitty sound quality, but bidirectional audio.
MonaroVXR 4y ago
QC35... Switch between One Plus 6 and Envy 2021 2 in 1 seamlessly. Everything switches seamlessly from LG earbuds to Samsung Galaxy A52 5G, Nintendo Switch, Envy with Pop OS and Windows 11. I have no idea what people are doing.
- techdragon 4y ago
  The QC35 Bose headphones I have are on their second ear cups, have years of daily use and I think I have run into pairing issues maybe a dozen times. And usually it was to do with having lots of devices in my history that are actively in use and it’s understandable it might be a little confused. It’s been trivial to purge a few less frequently used devices, turn them off and on and that’s it it’s good again. They’ve been an absolute joy and honestly the only feature I’m looking for to make me consider a new set of over ear headphones is being able to listen to audio from more than one device at once… it can be paired to two devices so I can quickly pick up an incoming call, and it will play audio from one or the other depending on which is muted or plays first. It won’t switch back and forth if any background audio (even inaudible silence seems to trigger this)

systemvoltage 4y ago

Same with USB consortium. Gotta pay like $10k to get a USB vendor ID. What the fuck were these people thinking to rally up behind this draconian standard? There is a limit to how many vendors they can have, iirc 10k. But for all the issues with it, usb seems to work on devices without Bluetooth-like issues. Standards should be open and free for common public and only have to pay once you reach certain company size. Things like ISO standards aren’t free.

blibble 4y ago
vendor id is 16-bit so should be enough for 65535 of them
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Yea a bunch of these are reserved. I remember jumping through the whole process when we were designing a usb device. To counter my own point, it takes money and people to run a standards committee and it is important to keep in mind that funding has to come from somewhere. Here are more details of what it takes to run one: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22968431/3908009 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22968431/3908009 IMO they should either be funded by gov or by large companies.
  - blibble 4y ago
    yes, $4k/year doesn't seem that bad for a company that's going to be producing a commercial product (and of course if you're just hacking locally you can do whatever you want as it's an open standard)
- lupire 4y ago
  Can you sublet a vendor id, like a taxi medallion?
- madacol 4y ago
  Maybe in next versions they should choose 256 bits (or 160, like bitcoin) which would be the hash of a public key, an any vendor that provides a valid signature, can claim that 160 bit vendor ID. No more need for a central authority I'm probably overengineering it, just pointing out it is technically possible
  - lttlrck 4y ago
    There is no obvious reason why USB couldn't have used used Ethernet MAC vendor Id, aside from politics. Instead there could be a single registry like IANA.
jfim 4y ago
10k is a negligible amount for a device manufacturer. You'd be surprised at how expensive it is to manufacture things. A plastic injection mold to make plastic parts can be in the five figures, for example.