Why does Bluetooth have many unresolved frustrations, despite thousands of complaints about said issues?

Question

Is there a good reason why users can’t turn Bluetooth off entirely and prevent the system or apps for turning it back on?

Is there a good reason why there isn’t an option to never connect to a certain Bluetooth device automatically, without unpairing it?

Is there a good reason why some phones and devices just won’t pair, despite them being compatible looking spec-wise?

In: 7

Answer 1

Short answer is Bluetooth is designed to be simple and cheap, cell phones were in their infancy when Bluetooth was introduced. To answer your questions directly:

1. Apps having the ability to turn on Bluetooth automatically would be decided by the phone’s software. The Bluetooth chip just does what it’s told.
2. You can call this short-sighted, but Bluetooth wasn’t designed with this in mind. The internet was just in its infancy, cell phones were a luxury item for the elites that still have pull-out antennas. The idea that everyone would have multiple master and multiple client devices that they would want to connect to each other just wasn’t foreseen.
3. There’s multiple versions of Bluetooth, going from release 1 to release 5, and there’s sub-releases within that. They are mostly backwards compatible, so, a master devices that’s Bluetooth 3 and a client device that’s Bluetooth 1 should be able to work together. However, there is a big exception, and that’s when BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) was introduced in release 4 (and upgraded in 5). Even though it has the Bluetooth name, BLE is an entirely new protocol. As its name suggest, it uses less power, especially during downtimes. However, since it’s a new protocol, you don’t have backward compatibility. Most master devices (like cell phones) have the BLE protocol and the Bluetooth Classic protocol available, so they should be able to connect to anything, but, for client devices, like AirPods, they will often just have BLE. This means that if you have a master devices that’s release 3 or earlier, they won’t be able to connect to BLE devices. If you want to figure out if your device is BLE or not, it’s safe to assume it is if it has release 4.0 or later on it and if it has a battery power option.