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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

Too bad iOS makes it very hard to disable bluetooth. Android was swipe+click, iOS it's swipe, two long presses, two clicks. Or you can type it, but that's obviously more clicks (though possibly faster).

I used to make the effort when I switched from Android, but I already gave up...

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It’s impossible to permanently disable Bluetooth on iOS. Every iOS update re-enables it.

Same on MacOS. It got to the point where I made a start up script to check and disable Bluetooth.

Apples official stance is that this behavior “functions as intended”.

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/bluetooth.html

I had to create custom shortcuts to disable WiFi and Bluetooth after Apple made the ones from Control Center useless.

Is it possible to do for Location as well? Last time I tried to search for it, it really wasn't possible except through Siri somehow.

I made one to open locations in settings via open URL: prefs:root=Privacy&path=LOCATION

Wow, that's bonkers. I thought apple cared about privacy?

it's route for the settings menu, not sure it works in the browser :)

here's a list with all settings urls: https://github.com/FifiTheBulldog/ios-settings-urls/blob/mas...

It makes sense for most people. When they want to turn those off they want to either disconnect from WiFi or disconnect from Bluetooth audio, and they don’t expect things like airdrop or their Apple Watch to stop working when they turn them off.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity for a UI affordance to me. Instead, Apple has chosen the path of least-yet-most-unpleasant surprise.

To be fair, the default behavior does exactly what I want: Disconnect me from a broken Wi-Fi network/Bluetooth headphone/speaker implementation that is hijacking my audio output, without breaking "Find My", Airdrop or Wi-Fi geolocation.

AirPods can stay connected, which is maybe unfair towards third-party vendors, but they also don't insist on connecting to all paired devices at once and usually pick the two wrong ones and steal audio from whoever in my home is using that device at the moment.

> Too bad iOS makes it very hard to disable bluetooth.

Depending on whether you have the Settings icon on your Home Screen, that’s three taps (Settings -> Bluetooth -> Off). Not even any scrolling.

Setting doesn't always open on "home".

Annoyingly so it doesn't even always open on the expected screen, e.g. when opening "Wifi settings" from the network selection you might end up in notifications if it was the last screen you used. Not a consistent bug.

You can make a shortcut with the action Toggle and set Bluetooth

I’m trying this now and can’t figure this out. I’ve been trying for months now.

I’m adding a new action, I search toggle and Bluetooth and I’m not getting any actions to set Bluetooth. What am I doing wrong? Edit: Scratch that! I figured it out! Realised I wanted a way to connect to a Bluetooth device (my flaky headphones don’t always connect, pain to dig into the settings every time)

Make a shortcut to disable or enable and add that shortcut to your Home Screen

On iOS you can scroll diagonally from top right corner and one more click to disable it.

It is not permanent and comes back when disabling airplane mode, in addition to updates too.

The toggle in control centre does not disable Bluetooth. It disconnects Bluetooth until tomorrow. It even says that in control centre when you tap on the toggle.

Am I missing something? Swipe from the top, tap to disable BT?

That’s unfortunately only disconnecting until the next day (see text appearing above when pressing).

Notice the difference in color when you do that. As the other comment pointed out, it only disconnects devices. Apple makes it hard for their users to disable bluetooth (or gps) so features like airtag work well.

You are sacrificing your battery life (and I guess privacy and security) for the ecosystem to work.

Google won't let you use GPS for maps without also turning on wifi for similar reasons I guess. It does make it more accurate but shouldn't be required.

Wasn’t there this thing that Google collected a list of SSIDs using their Google Maps cars, and that gave them “good enough” geolocation using passive WiFi scanning, which was much less battery intensive and faster than GPS?

That's nonsense, Maps works perfectly fine with wifi off

They might have changed it again, but it was a thing, I saw the prompts mentioned here too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865

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