[angoragoats]

You're responding in a sub-thread where others have specifically called out the fact that you can't get battery status from AirPods on non-Apple platforms. This is, to my knowledge, a feature that is supported natively by the Bluetooth stacks on every mainstream OS and requires no "apps" at all. For example, I can connect my Bluetooth mouse to my Linux machine and it happily reports the state of the battery.

Care to offer a justification for why this is the case without resorting to "the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth can't be bothered to build an app"?

[butlike]

Because what's the point in having 'fuck you' money if you never get to say 'fuck you?'

[sroussey]

The multi battery levels thing is native proprietary on every platform since there is no Bluetooth spec for more than one battery level and even that just uses uint8.

[angoragoats]

As I posted elsewhere in the thread, this is incorrect. The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries and individual battery reporting for each. [0] They even give the example in that doc of earbuds which are one “logical device” but two physically separate pieces, each with its own battery.

As additional evidence, there are "AirPods-like" earbuds on the market such as the Sony WF-C700N, which have no problem reporting three battery levels over standard Bluetooth on e.g. Linux.

[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...

[inferiorhuman]

  The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries

As of version 1.1 of the battery service which was finalized at the end of 2022. Given Bluetooth's track record, who knows what kind of interoperability landmines exist.

[angoragoats]

Man, HN really likes to make excuses for Apple.

No, implementing multiple instances of the Battery Service to report battery state for several batteries has been there since the 1.0 spec. [0]

This spec was released in 2011, five years before the first AirPods were released.

Doing what several commenters claimed was impossible has in fact been possible with native Bluetooth for a decade and a half.

[0] https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/downloaddoc.ashx?d...

[inferiorhuman]

If you don't like the Apple device, use something else. It's not like a messaging platform where you'd need compatibility with other peoples' phones.

If you'd bothered to dig into the spec, v1.0 basically says do what you want. v1.1 defines a proper namespace and well known descriptions for multiple batteries. Apple did well to avoid the interoperability minefield.

[angoragoats]

Stop moving the goalposts.

> If you don't like the Apple device, use something else. It's not like a messaging platform where you'd need compatibility with other peoples' phones.

I own and use lots of devices, for both work and personal tasks, including Apple and non-Apple devices. I own a pair of AirPods. I'd like them to work well across all the platforms that I use. There is nothing technically preventing Apple from achieving this, aside from Apple's arguably illegal tying behavior.

> If you'd bothered to dig into the spec, v1.0 basically says do what you want. v1.1 defines a proper namespace and well known descriptions for multiple batteries. Apple did well to avoid the interoperability minefield.

I have read the spec; please don't accuse me of not reading it. Have you written Bluetooth device firmware before? In case you haven't, at a high level:

* The BT device exposes a "profile," which defines one or more "services", which are essentially different types of data that can be read from or written to the device.

* Multiple instances of the same type of service (the Battery Service in this case) can be exposed in the profile. I don't know if this ability was always present in the spec or was added after the fact, but it was, at minimum, present in 2011 when the BAS 1.0 spec was released.

* So, if your device has more than one battery, its profile will have an instance of the Battery Service defined for each one.

I will grant that the 1.1 spec document is a lot clearer and provides lots of diagrammed examples, but the only net new functionality in 1.1 are a set of new battery-related fields (these are called out near the beginning).

1.0 absolutely does not say "do what you want."

[gblargg]

So they refuse to report anything useful rather than make use of the single battery level. Amazingly every other brand of Bluetooth earbuds manage to report a useful battery level despite them having a separate battery in each side.

[hluska]

The Bluetooth spec only supports one battery status. AirPods have three batteries. Is 1 < 3 a satisfactory enough answer to you?

On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company. If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.

[angoragoats]

> The Bluetooth spec only supports one battery status. AirPods have three batteries. Is 1 < 3 a satisfactory enough answer to you?

No, it's not. The Bluetooth Battery Service spec allows for a single device with multiple batteries and individual battery reporting for each. [0] They even give the example in that doc of earbuds which are one “logical device” but two physically separate pieces, each with its own battery.

> On the subject of the multi-trillion-dollar behemoth, Apple is a private company.

Apple is, by definition, a public company.

> If you have the capital, you can acquire a controlling interest and then they’ll work on whatever you like. Until then, you’re out of luck.

No. Anticompetitive behavior such as tying (what I would argue is happening here) can and should always be subject to examination, criticism, and possible litigation by the public.

[0] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/Files/Specifica...

[potatototoo99]

Always this sad argument that X is a private company and they can do what they like.

Companies are not acts of God or nature. They are a private company operating on a society that allows it to exist because it is believed to be the for the public good. The public has very much the right to question it's practices, and if they are anti consumer, monopolistic, or a list of other things, to correct them. Shareholders be damned.

[inferiorhuman]

So what's your argument then? Companies can't release a product unless each and every feature works with their competitors products? By that logic most of the software and hardware you use today simply would not exist.

Like a lot of parts of the (especially earlier revisions of) Bluetooth spec the battery status took a slapdash approach to defining things. Look at anyone who's used Bluetooth on Windows to see what a nightmare interoperability still is. So Apple released ear buds that implement poorly defined parts of the spec but otherwise work with third party bluetooth devices, and that's bad?

Yikes.

Meanwhile, the Bluetooth SIG released an update at the end of 2022 that actually starts to require some sort of standardization. You know who's name was on that little update? Big bad awful anticompetitive Apple.

[spacedcowboy]

Yeah, there are two batteries, the one in the earbuds and the one in the container. There's no way in BLE to transmit both values - and choosing either one is lying to the user about something.

It's not uncommon (at least for me) to have a low earbud battery level (because I've just binged Slow Horses) or a low container battery (because I've just charged the earbuds from the container for the third time and drained the container). There's a suggestion above that you should "just choose the lowest one because 99% of the time that's what you're interested in", except that's not true in the second case.

I'm fairly sure that if you could report both, then Apple would report both using this hypothetical standard method, but since you can't, and there's no easy way to just "choose one" without misleading the user about something, they choose to do it properly, even though that means it's an Apple-only thing.

[angoragoats]

See my other replies in this thread — it’s totally possible to do with standard Bluetooth, yet Apple doesn’t do it. So your “fairly sure” assumption that Apple would make use of this feature if it existed seems to be wrong.