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

[zachallaun]

There was a recent, highly upvoted article about the pains of Bluetooth: 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.

[davidhyde]

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/

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]

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.

[bee_rider]

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]

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.

[ikeboy]

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.

[felurx]

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.

[solardev]

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-recei...

Look for AptX low-latency support too if you care about audio lag (for movies or games).

[bee_rider]

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.

[MonaroVXR]

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]

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)

[xlii]

AFAIK it's not about Apple, but about other producers either polluting spectrum or plainly ignoring specs.

There was a post about Logitech not creating a lot of interference with their MX products (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31939424). Interestingly enough getting rid of Logitech devices fixed most of the BT issues I had.

[googlryas]

I have constant issues the single bluetooth device in myhouse - my Bose bluetooth QC-35s, and a google produced phone and google produced laptop which it connects to. Both of those groups should be able to get bluetooth right.

[solardev]

I can't even get my Airpods to work consistently with my iPad, or Pixel Buds to work consistently with my Pixel phone. And it gets exponentially worse if you try to connect to more than one device at a time, across vendors or even chipsets. Bluetooth is a hopeless mess.

[natch]

That’s a good point and something I could look into (very) locally in my setup. Not many non-Apple devices around except a couple of cars and one mouse but yeah they could be causing problems.

[antomeie]

SIG did not do an excellent job with the tech, that's for sure, but his point is still valid, that poor implementations of it causes further issues. Also, SIG is quite slow with new features, so companies start adding their own stuff on top of it. With Apple, things like sharing BT pairings over iCloud comes to mind, which is kind of a weird hack. They also do some non-standard switching between LE and Classic on the go.

[wvenable]

Are you sure the problem is Apple and not the device on the other side?

[natch]

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.

[ricardobeat]

In my experience the W1-equipped headphones all work flawlessly, pairing is instant. The only thing that is still annoying is the difficulty of managing multiple devices & headphones, when the built-in 'right thing to do' (like connecting to the last used device) can conflict with your real intent.

[systemvoltage]

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.

[jfim]

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.

[blibble]

vendor id is 16-bit so should be enough for 65535 of them

[systemvoltage]

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

IMO they should either be funded by gov or by large companies.

[blibble]

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)

[madacol]

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]

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.

[lupire]

Can you sublet a vendor id, like a taxi medallion?

[david927]

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.

[noir_lord]

> 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.

[BrandoElFollito]

This reminds me when our president (France) announced the quarantine and schools shutdown.

While my children were yelling their joy (we could hear all children in the neighborhood), I sat at Amazon to order three 20 m ethernet cables. They were part of our home decoration for a year and a half, laying across the house to reliably connect to the switch and fiber.

[simonh]

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.

[navbaker]

I actually have to use wired ear buds with my gaming laptop since I found wireless interferes with also using a wireless Xbox controller.

[tehjoker]

i just thread the wire under my shirt, it's pretty similar and you can take the earbuds off and they just hang there

[vel0city]

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.

[prmoustache]

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]

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.

[zachallaun]

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

[bee_rider]

Logitech's silly little plug-in receivers seem to be weirdly better than bluetooth, and they have been for as long as I remember. I don't really get why. If they have some magic technology in there, how has the Bluetooth SIG not managed to copy it?

[falcolas]

The magic technology is that it's not following the bluetooth spec. It's a custom spec that works remarkably well, because it's reasonably scoped and not written by a multi-corporation-for-profit SIG.

Their dongles for wireless audio work like magic too - as close to zero latency as I've found in wireless computer headphones.

[ROTMetro]

You are telling me that a single purpose spec/software/hardware stack works better than a complicated multi use case/OS/hardware standard? Call me shocked.

My cordless phone in the 90s dropped less calls than my cell phone today, how have cell phone companies not managed to copy it?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

My understanding is that one of BT's big problems is that it's underspecified, so every implementation is slightly incompatible. Only having to deal with one implementation is therefore probably enough magic, but the BT SIG can't just copy it without changing the spec.

[rockostrich]

> I even have an extra long network cable I can throw across the living room for the laptop

This seems unnecessary unless you have high latency requirements, like for FPS or fighter gaming, but even then WiFi (and network coding for these games) has gotten so good that lag is barely noticeable anyway.

I say this as someone who has my desk hardwired with an unmanaged switch because it seems silly to not take the time to hardwire a stationary PC and the place where I spend the majority of my time working: if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps.

[Karunamon]

To be a bit pedantic, lag and throughput aren't the main bugbears for wireless anymore, it's stability. If you live or work in a reasonably populated area, there is often enough Wi-Fi pollution around to make things like gaming or video calls painful. Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time, the problem is it will occasionally spike to 200 or 2000 for a moment and there's very little you can do about it.

[falcolas]

100% - it's these occasional spikes which honk everything up. Google meets immediately assumes your internet is crap and degrades the client, you become a robot to your listeners, and recovery takes noticeably longer than the few hundred MS it occurred in.

[vel0city]

> Sure, you'll get around 20 ms to the AP most of the time

If you're getting 20ms to your AP you're in a pretty poor environment or you need to upgrade away from 802.11b.

While on a video call on my laptop just now, while my home theater receiver is streaming internet radio over WiFi, while I've got a dozen other devices active on my WiFi, my average latency to my router is ~1ms. Running a speed test on my phone pushing pulling >500Mbit, my latency spiked...to 12ms!

Just like with the rest of this discussion about Bluetooth being bad, if you've got poor equipment and a poor environment you're gonna have a bad time. I have some cheap USB WiFi adapters which are terrible and struggle to get good performance. I don't use those except for temporary things or when I just don't care about network performance. I don't have issues with the Intel WiFi chips on my desktop or laptops or my Ubiquiti APs.

[rockostrich]

Thank you. My ping to my router from everywhere in my house on WiFi (even my roof, 3 story row house with an AP on each floor) is 5 ms. So stupid to run wire across a living room when you could just have decent networking equipment.

[jaywalk]

20ms to your router? That's horrendous.

[rockostrich]

I live in a city. Opening my wifi menu on my MBP, I see dozens of networks. I've never really experienced any spikes like you mentioned every with gaming or video calls.

[t-3]

It probably heavily depends on your networking equipment. Most modern APs should have interference detection, MIMO, beamforming, variable channel width, etc., but if you're on 2.4GHz in a crowded building with thin walls I'd imagine things could get pretty hairy. Even in ideal conditions, wireless will have far more dropped packets, transport overhead, power draw, etc.

[he_is_legend]

> if I go downstairs with my work laptop then I'm going going to drape an ethernet cable across my living room just so my connection is 1 Gbps still instead of 400+ Mbps

Are you missing the word "not" in there somewhere? Or being really obtuse? Your comment makes little sense as is. Initially you encourage hard wired unmoving appliances, but then also get behind draping a cable across a room to make sure movable appliances also get the best possible bandwidth?

[rockostrich]

Nah, you're right. I missed a "not" and added an extra "going".

[david927]

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?

[rand49an]

Because WiFi is only trying to fix one problem: connect your device to a local network. Bluetooth has hundreds of different use-cases.

[ghaff]

>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.

[bornfreddy]

I agree 99% - the exception being the mouse. Since it is meant to be moved around, any obstacle (such as cable) really changes how it handles. I didn't believe it until I went to wireless and then (for a short time) back.

Otherwise agree for keyboard, network, headphones,... Wires work.

[The_Colonel]

Well, head moves quite a lot as well. Out of all wireless things, the headphones have been the biggest revolution for me.

[asdff]

That's been the biggest step back for me. I have plenty of wire length on my headphones, never felt like I couldn't turn my head or was in any way hindered. Having to keep them charged up and buy replacement batteries every few years seems a lot more annoying.

[PaulHoule]

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

and I have a pair of these at home

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.

[georgeecollins]

>> 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

My experience as well-- just gonna put a little plug here in for the Jabra Elite bluetooth headset, that works really well for me.

[fragmede]

Most people aren't aware of that because it isn't a thing. Listening to music and podcasts on an iphone, streamed via WiFi, then resent via Bluetooth to airpods works just fine for me. I can't say why you're having problems with it though

[curioussavage]

I listen to my phone/AirPods daily over Wi-Fi and cellular and walk up to 3 floors away from the phone to my basement with barely a stutter.

[rhacker]

I don't think you explained why you disagree. If it's difficult, why is that wrong, why do you disagree?

[david927]

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]

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.

[Jenk]

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]

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

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.

[foobarian]

I worked a bunch with BT closer to the physical layer, and I have to say I was always impressed by how well specified and implemented things were up to the link layer. I think it works fantastically well. But unfortunately it's an invisible achievement, kind of how IT folks don't get recognized when things work; instead when people say "Bluetooth sucks" it's usually due to poor app profile implementations/specs.

As a result, saying "let's invent a better Bluetooth" contains a hidden trap: it requires reinventing that really good core, which is probably really expensive, which then would not leave much to build better app profiles and we would end up with a similar problem.

We should not be inventing a better Bluetooth but fixing the app profile certification. I'm not sure what the right solution there is.

[spicybright]

Granted, I know very little about this, but I wonder if you could wipe the slate above the link layer for a "new protocol".

Devices all have bluetooth chips already, which is probably the hardest part of adoption.

Then you can define a new system on top, and even swap out the bottom if this new "red tooth" catches on.

Ofc you still have a massive uphill battle, particularly getting manufacturers to agree to a more sane spec than what we have currently (which I wouldn't hold my breath on, that's for sure)

[stinkledinkle]

Also the android bluetooth stack has always been trash, with it varying per vendor on how bad it got. It's getting better, but still.

[ricardobeat]

To this date I'm perplexed by how hard it is to send anything from one device to another in close proximity.

I remember being surprised when the first BT capable (Motorola?) phone I had couldn't send photos to a laptop, maybe twenty years ago. iPhones never got that ability over bluetooth. Airdrop is still hit and miss.

Bump.me was the closest thing to perfection, unfortunately Facebook acquired and immediately threw it in the dumpster.

[molasses]

What was bump.me? Photo sharing is why Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp is insanely popular. Sharing photos is just difficult.

I've had to resort in the past of putting a small web server on the phone, just to get files off it via WIFI. But of course that's clunky.

If peer to peer networking were easier, trustable etc, it could be a real life saver. There's some feature in Google Files that's WIFI sharing, but I haven't tried it.

[ricardobeat]

You’d select a photo or any file to transfer, bump your phones together and ta-da, it was sent over. No accounts or friend lists necessary.

It used a mix of geolocation and wireless signals to determine the match and worked flawlessly. You could even do the same with a computer by bumping the phone against the spacebar!

This was over a decade ago. It’s very depressing to see great tech like this just disappear into the void.

[rchaud]

> Bluetooth was hailed as the Next Big Thing because it would enable "Personal Area Networks" (PAN), a now all-but-forgotten buzzword.

Apparently I have a PAN. First time I'm hearing the term!

I use BT to quickly transfer images and PDFs I find online from my phone to my laptop. All I needed to do was select "Share to Bluetooth" menu on my Android phone and select my MacBook from the list of available devices.

[Jenk]

Bluetooth was _adopted_ by IEEE 802.15, using Bluetooth as a base. It didn't invent it.

I'm also older than that. I was referring to the initial Bluetooth papers by Ericsson Mobile in the early 90s.

[pydry]

I remember this too. They even talked about "smart clothes". Like, in the future you'd have CPU in your jeans or something. For what purposes I was never really sure.

[causi]

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.

[mikestew]

I might even still have my ThinkOutside lying around somewhere, but the keys were getting a bit sticky for some reason. There is something about that market that I'm obviously missing, because I'm astounded that no one has cloned the thing. Though I don't have the use case for one that I used to, I'd still spend the money again. It is such a cool little device, I'd find something to do with it.

[rgoulter]

I think it's relegated to low-volume hobbyists. e.g. this is low-profile, wireless, and looks well made. https://lowprokb.ca/products/corne-ish-zen

[causi]

I tossed mine for the same reason. I believe the fact all the keys are depressed when the keyboard is folded causes the rubber domes to permanently deform after years under compression.

[The_Colonel]

> It has since been used for many things that it just wasn't engineered to do.

I don't buy this line of reasoning.

Bluetooth is at version 5.3, it's not stuck at specification from 1998. The original revision might have been designed for only a few use cases, but later revisions added support for a lot of new things (e.g. multipoint) and I wouldn't be surprised if the protocol has been (several times) completely rearchitected to better support the new reality.

[AlotOfReading]

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.

[molasses]

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.

[pwinnski]

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.

[lotsofpulp]

>How many people buy cars based on the speed with which Bluetooth connects?

I would not rank Bluetooth itself as being high on the list of wants for a car, but I would rank quality wireless Carplay / Android Auto functionality pretty high (along with a wireless charging mount). If it is possible, but I have not seen that it is yet. Until then, wired CarPlay / Android Auto works fine. And lack of CarPlay / Android Auto is a dealbreaker.

[saiya-jin]

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.

[AlotOfReading]

The size of the paired devices list isn't even in the spec. It's entirely up to the manufacturer. All the spec tells you to do is store the specified info somewhere and gives an error code to be returned if you can't for some reason. 8 is typical, but there are various reasons you might want to chose 1 instead. It simplifies and speeds up reconnection, eliminates unnecessary button combos, and potentially reduces BOM cost, etc.

[jrmg]

The reason (or a reason, at least) we have poor implementations, though, is that the protocol stack is so incredibly complicated.

[rchaud]

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.

[ecliptik]

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/

[abhaynayar]

> aughts

Nice, never knew what to call that decade before.

[vel0city]

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.

[IshKebab]

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]

This is not supported Mac OS unfortunately. I did some digging, and it was previously only possible with an AirPort hardware device as a middleman.

[giantg2]

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]

Exactly. At this point, it's not the protocol. It's devices with shitty implementations of the protocol.

[AlotOfReading]

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.

[Analemma_]

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.

[vel0city]

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]

> 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]

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]

You're looking at the wrong layer. Pipewire replaces pulseaudio, not alsa. And it's included in 22.10 by default.

I expect that soon the extra features are going to hit the default mixers too - we just need a bit of time for that.

[fallingfrog]

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]

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.

[asdff]

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]

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]

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.

[vel0city]

> You'd probably get better sound for your money buying a vintage stereo than a modern one with bt shoehorned in.

Eh, I like having it be able to get the digital audio for my home theater setup and handle features like Dolby TrueHD/Atmos and DTS MasterAudio and eARC directly on the receiver instead of having dozens of discrete devices with dozens of analog connections in a cramped case. It's a higher end Onkyo unit, it seems to perform pretty well. I like a lot of the features such as having multiple zones as well.

The other aspect with having it cabled is then my phone is literally physically tethered to my stereo. I can't take it around with me in the house while it's playing music. I can't read things on it or reply to messages or emails without having to stand by the stereo.

Sure, I do sacrifice some slight audio quality using Bluetooth. But to me it's more than made up for by the extreme flexibility of wireless connectivity. And for my pool example, I'm in a noisy outdoor environment driving a couple of all weather speakers pretty hard. I'm not going for extreme high fidelity in that environment.

I've got a Logitech MX Anywhere mouse that can do three profiles of either Bluetooth or Unifying. I have one profile for my work laptop, one profile for my personal laptop, and one profile for my phone, all Bluetooth. I've never had a profile get broken.

I also use a Kensington Expert Wireless mouse and mostly use the Bluetooth connectivity to my work laptop. I've changed the batteries maybe twice in the several years of ownership. It has always just automatically paired when I get in to the office and starts working right away. I've never had to re-do a pairing on it.

On my gaming PC I use Bluetooth gamepads and VR wands. I did have a driver issue after upgrading to Windows 11 which the only resolution I could figure out was a fresh install. After that I haven't run into any other issues with that device.

All my computers use Intel WiFi/Bluetooth chips. They definitely seem to be some of the best quality.

I've had crappy Bluetooth speakers before. They behaved like you've said, where they just seem to forget their pairing or become unreliable over time. I've also had good Bluetooth speakers and headphones that are very good at remembering what they were last paired to and seem to connect almost instantly.

These days even my car key is Bluetooth. I use a Phone as a Key setup, so walking up to my car with my phone authenticates me. Getting in to my car with my phone allows it to be started. All this happens with Bluetooth. I rarely bother taking a key fob with me when I leave.

[navjack27]

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.

[schaefer]

We do have something better! And we’ve had it for decades.

It’s a cable.

[3pt14159]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[RockRobotRock]

My noise cancelling bluetooth headphones will still work without any power if you plug them into 3.5mm. Of course, they were horrendously expensive, so any longevity gains are outweighed by the cost.

[mixmastamyk]

Tuck the cable inside the shirt, and most of these aren't issues. Quality excellent. Also don't have to worry about earbuds falling off to be run over, or falling in a storm drain. Sounds unlikely but my keys just narrowly missed this on a recent bike ride.

[colinmhayes]

People say this, I don't find it to be true. I still got the cable stuck on door handles all the time when it was tucked into my shirt, because finding the perfect cable length is impossible. Either way, the main problem remains; I want to be to move around a room with my headphones but without my phone/computer. That requires wireless.

[mixmastamyk]

Never happened, three feet is perfect for head to waist pocket. With cable inside shirt it is impossible for this to happen, perhaps you did it differently.

[jhbadger]

People are different heights, and it isn't only differences in leg length. Maybe for you three feet is the perfect length for head to waist, but that's not universal.

[soheil]

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.

[swamp40]

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.

[tpmx]

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?

[PeterisP]

> Surely the vast majority of BT complexity in a modern stack is in the software?

Depends on what you call software - of course it's code, but pretty much all of the complexity of the stack is in firmware code of the BT chip, not in software running on your main OS/CPU.

[tpmx]

Is this still the basic division of work?

https://hearinghealthmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/...

Bottom layers beneath the HCI layer divider in HW, layers above software running in the "BT firmware chip" (I'm going to guess ARM-based)?

[swamp40]

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.

[swamp40]

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.

[rapjr9]

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/

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.)

[fuzzfactor]

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.

[SavageBeast]

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.

[oneplane]

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.

[k4ch0w]

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.

[zemo]

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.

[duped]

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.

[bombcar]

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that my first "almost new" car purchase (Hertz Used Cars) came down to two - both of German make amusingly enough.

Since everything else I cared about (price, legroom, etc) was basically the same, the brand I went with was the one who's stereo worked better with my iPhone.

[CivBase]

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]

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

[zemo]

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]

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.

[neilc]

I think the wireless pairing/device switching experience with AirPods is a big reason (not the only reason) why they are so popular.

[asdff]

I've otoh bought products specifically because they have non wireless fallbacks or are wired only (even better, no batteries).

[amelius]

Perhaps certification is the solution then. You can't sell Bluetooth unless it's been certified.

[greenthrow]

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.

[vkoskiv]

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]

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.

[zajio1am]

People who want reliable operations use wired connections (e.g. USB).

People who prefer wireless are anyway accustomed to things that suck.

[andyjohnson0]

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.

[Pxtl]

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.

[user3939382]

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.

[mmphosis]

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.

[senectus1]

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.

[layer8]

> Can't connect multiple headsets to one device

Bluetooth 5.0 allows connecting two headsets simultaneously.

[jeroenhd]

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).

[robotnikman]

There is an xkcd for this

https://xkcd.com/927/

[gibspaulding]

I was thinking of this one: https://xkcd.com/2055/

[jvalencia]

I've had the endless connected loop more times than I can count!