[foooorsyth]

>and the Android Bluetooth stack is unreliable and buggy.

It is truly the worst. Up until API level 33 (Android 13 from 2022!!!), all characteristic read/writes were memory unsafe. Now readCharacteristic is async for memory safety, but you're still expected to send a value synchronously with BluetoothGattServer#sendResponse when onCharacteristicWrite gets hit, so sending a value that's derived from any characteristic values is impossible before you fall out of scope. And notifying/indicating is just never reliable -- it just fails to work consistently device to device. And the high level API for the CCCD often doesn't work and requires you to set the 0x2902 descriptor manually.

CoreBluetooth handles BLE so elegantly and Android just botches it. Sad.