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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

I assumed that every store has been doing this for years. One of the major complaints of iOS 13 (or maybe 12?) was that it by default it automatically enabled Bluetooth every morning even when you manually disabled it.

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It only re-enables auto-joining devices every morning, it doesn't re-enable the BT radio if you disable it in settings. Bluetooth stays on after you hit the control center toggle because most consumers want that button to mean "don't connect to any BT audio devices", not "disable connection to my apple watch".

If you are sharing BT headphones between multiple devices this is horrible. I turn off BT on the device where I do not need the headphone to avoid BT connection confusion.

That’s only because you don’t use AirPods. And I don’t actually mean that snarkingly. I’m a truly lazy person, so I bought AirPods just because I knew they’d work and I wouldn’t have to fiddle with them. But reading these kinds of replies, especially in a tech savvy forum, makes me realize how valuable these little conveniences are

Tech savvy guy here.

Would have been nicer of Apple to just contribute a generic improvement back to the Bluetooth Standard, instead of solving a problem by creating "AirPods Bluetooth" and split the market.

Using that course, Google went and made Google-custom enhancements to Bluetooth as well, to apply nearly the same improvements to the user experience as Apple did.

And now here we are, with a universal standard that should work across different products and industries, but for good user experience you now have to brand-match your Bluetooth devices...

Really sad to watch common standards die. With all its flaws aside, I wonder if anything like Bluetooth would even be possible to happen today...

Bluetoth as a standard ist pretty botched, sadly. If I understood correctly it is a bunch of only loosely related protocols between major versions. And implementations often seem to be lacking. At least my experience with BT is horrible and over time loaded with hate and anger.

Interesting to hear that Apple managed to solve the issues within their closed ecosystem. So at least a solution DOES exists. The world could be so much better! Agree that it would be nice it thos solutions could penetrate the non-Apple world also.

not most consumers, “apple wants”.

Same here, I'm fairly certain that's a thing [1]. Anecdotally, I've started turning off wifi/Bluetooth in the parking lot before entering a big box store like Walmart, and it seems like I get less ads for stuff in the aisle of the store I walked down.

Ironically, this method of tracking is one of the conter-arguments I've heard to the "Facebook is recording my conversations" theory.

I don't know enough about it to understand how this attack is different than in-store phone tracking.

[1] https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2019/12/19/21011527/...

Did you disable it in the control panel or in settings? IIRC it used to temporarily disable it from control panel but permanently from regular settings.

Thank you for this information, it seems to work.

It never turns off in control center in iOS. You only disconnect it from devices. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-turn-off-bluetooth-on-phones...

It kind of astounds me that so many people are willing to use a product who's UI so blatently and unapologetically violates it's users consent. I would have immediately run for the hills.

Don’t care because it actually does what I want. I turn off Bluetooth or wifi usually because something isn’t working or I just want a quick way to disconnect from Bluetooth audio. I like that it turns it back on for me when I forget.

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