Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

The thing that gets me about bluetooth is how nonsensical the conflict resolution is. Like, if I'm playing something through a bluetooth speaker, and my wife wanders into range while listening to a podcast on her phone, it will automatically connect to the speaker and boot me off. How does it make sense to auto-connect when another device is already using the speaker? Similarly, I'll be listening to my bluetooth headphones, and my wife starts her car in the garage below me—suddenly my phone disconnects from the headphones and connects to the car instead. If I'm already playing through one bluetooth device, I probably don't want to automatically switch to a different one - especially one with a far weaker signal/likely farther away.

I get that these aren't trivial problems to solve, but they certainly seem possible to improve on, given the maturity of bluetooth at this point. Also perhaps they aren't the fault of the protocol at all, but just the choices made in programming phone OS's. Regardless, it's annoying!

Are these part of bluetooth spec itself?

My guess is it's actually part of the managing software.

Specifically I guess this because this is what my Airpods do. They don't switch 'players' if I'm actively listening to something, but if I'm not, whatever 'boots' last is the one who gets to become my Airpod's player.

The fact that we have different experiences tends me to think it's a higher layer that's doing the 'auto switching' and someone made too simplistic of an auto-switcher?

My opinion on this is that These problems are actually trivial to solve. The problem with firmware is that it almost always lacks polish. It is shipped as soon as it works at a basic level.

That's odd, I've never had anything disconnect and connect to something else while playing. Is anyone else having that problem?

I'm not.

Yes, constantly. For instance I wander around the house listening to an audiobook on bluetooth headphones, walk into a weak signal zone, and the audiobook stops, and I hear in the bedroom that the bluetooth speaker next to the bed has mysteriously started to play a youtube video from my phone. So a momentary loss of signal causes the software to change both input and output. This is with a Samsung S9+.

I'm also on a Samsung (S20), so maybe they just particularly suck at bluetooth.

Sounds like you need to get better hardware friend. I would say the firmware on those devices is the cause of the issue. The phone is going to broadcast a connect packet to a device it knows, it's the devices job to let it connect or not. My edifier and sony bt speakers stick to one connection until it is disconnected.

edit: spelling

That's entirely possible. This has been the case on every device I've owned, but those have mostly been Samsung phones (currently a Galaxy S20), so maybe Samsung is just bad at this.

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