Currently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.

For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.

And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.

Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.

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aprilnya 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.

I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.

	▲	charcircuit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Buganizer is not where you submit code to be reviewed and accepted into Android. And by the author's own admission that change is a hack and not a proper fix. Anyone is free to make a proper fix and upstream it if they wanted to.

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worldsavior 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.

	▲	monerozcash 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods. This seems to go against how OS development (and perhaps consumer software in general, just think about browsers!) works in reality, it's just piles of exceptions on top of exceptions for weird hardware.
	▲	pests an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Guess the users suffer.

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userbinator 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth

That's because they're all based on a small set of BT SoCs from companies who are not exclusively dependent on the Apple ecosystem and need to interoperate with everything BT-compliant.

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bluescrn 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can headphones that stick to the spec actually play nicely with multiple devices? - switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?

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fsh 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, this is called Bluetooth multipoint and has been common on non-Apple devices (for example Bose) for a few years now. Requires no logins and is vendor-agnostic.

	▲	morshu9001 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's finnicky though. Sometimes, if I get a call on my phone and hang up, my Bose headphones tell my Mac to start playing music.

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eptcyka 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.

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raw_anon_1111 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you do that with 7 devices? Can you pair your device with your phone and it automatically pairs with all of your devices?

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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formerly_proven 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?

They do that? Mine can't even switch quickly between my corporate and my own iphone.

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pityJuke 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Are they on the same iCloud account? I believe that's the magic needed.

	▲	formerly_proven 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course not, that's the whole point of having a separate corp phone ;) But why would switching headphone connections need the cloud... ah... nevermind...