> Bluetooth DID (Device Identification) Hook
> Turns out, if you change the manufacturerid to that of Apple, you get access to several special features!
I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body. Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices; pretend you're an iPhone and you're in.
EDIT: read "unable to connect" => "unable to expose advanced functionality", ofc they connect just fine
AirPods can connect to any device and perform on par with other Bluetooth headphones. This is about availability of special features which require a dedicated driver non-Apple devices are not expected to have.
They don't report battery status to non-Apple devices. This is a pretty basic feature and without this I wouldn't consider them to perform "on par" with other Bluetooth headphones.
You're proving the parent commenter's point that "this is about availability of special features which require a dedicated driver non-Apple devices are not expected to have", because there is no standard way in BLE to report more than one battery value. Wireless earbuds are a device pair, each with its own battery.
Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP AT+IPHONEACCEV` standard for reporting battery levels to the OS.
> Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP
They could publish the details, and not block other manufacturer details, so that it is easier for other platforms to develop drivers for them. Or develop a new standard that works for their earbuds.
I wonder how well that conversation detection works. Does it really help in a loud environment?
As a neurodivergent person I lack the innate human skill to filter voices out of a cacaphony of noise so loud bars etc are hell. There also the "talking with earphones in is rude" but that's an issue that can just be explained.
Needing root to enable it is a major deal-breaker though :( and moving to an iPhone is impossible for me. Too much stuff that's not supported.
Or Apple just doesn't want to bother with the nightmare of supplying and supporting an app to do all those things on other platforms, and in particular, there are regulatory approvals around the "hearing aid" feature that would pretty much require a specific device.
They have a basic app for some of their other devices like the Beats line. One other thing you simply can't do without pairing AirPods with an Apple device is enrol them in AppleCare One.
You're commenting on a post where a random guy provides this "nightmare of supplying and supporting an app" in his spare time, except he actually has to work around Apple's malicious obfuscation and standards non-compliance, so it would actually be way easier for Apple to do it themselves.
From what it says, a rooted device is required because Apple made them behave differently depending on the host. Apple wouldn't have needed a rooted Android device to support all the features.
Are you saying this would the first time an unpaid open source effort has done something a big company declined to do because of the operational costs they face?
It is in fact significantly harder for Apple. Because nobody expects random spare time GitHub project to work perfectly. Or even very well. Apple’s reputation, and trillion dollar market value, is based on the idea that their stuff works perfectly.
good god man, just accept that this is objectively an EXTREMELY easy thing to do for anyone. Yes theoretically there are things that are easier for OSS devs than large companies, THIS AIN'T ONE OF THEM.
Ugh, trillion dollar market value doesn't mean they are incapable of making a basic android app. Check their move to ios app if you have any doubts.
It doesn’t matter how frustrated you get or how many times you write capital letters, Apple is a private company and can do exactly what they want to do. If you would like Apple to do your bidding, acquire a controlling interest - it’s public so there’s nothing stopping you.
Welcome to this argument which is about how easy/hard it might be for a company to implement this particular feature.
The argument about whether they ought to is in some other thread I imagine, you might have lost your way. I don't own their airpods so in this particular instance, IDC about the outcome.
Are you aware they are maintaining multiple complete OSs, and multiple versions of each? With drivers for hundreds of components? The scope of AirPods on Android is laughable in comparison.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
When a device has more than one instance of the Battery service, each Battery
Level characteristic shall include a Characteristic Presentation Format
descriptor that has a namespace/description value that is unique for that
instance of the Battery service.
1.1 says:
When a device has more than one instance of the Battery Service, each Battery
Level characteristic shall include a Characteristic Presentation Format descriptor
(Volume 3, Part G, Section 3.3.3.5 in [1]) that has the Name Space field set to
”Bluetooth SIG” and the Description field set to a valid value from the GATT
Namespace Descriptors [4] and that is unique among all instances of the Battery
Service exposed by the GATT Server.
1.0 was a mess and your anger over a poorly defined and relatively minor feature seems quite misplaced. Bluetooth interoperability has historically been a mess (still is from my experience). But go ahead be big mad that Airpods only play audio from third party devices and don't provide battery status in a way that adheres to a recent revision of the standard. Meanwhile I'm sure Sony would never use a proprietary format ever…
I had posted a reply addressing your points, but I don't think this discussion is productive and you don't seem to want to engage honestly with what I'm saying and stay on topic. So I'll just say have a good day.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What "other platforms" are you talking about? Just an Android app would suffice. It's not a huge deal for a company worth trillions, especially if the features are already there and they're just blocking non-Apple products. If they deliberately do that, it makes you think they don't really care about their customers and are more interested in locking people into their ecosystem.
Not just non-Apple devices. I have a machine with older MacOS and the current Apple keyboard doesn't report battery status. I can't think of a reason why that would work differently from Apple's own older keyboards, but it does.
Actually even within Apple ecosystem not all devices are made equal. MacBooks lack some features available for AirPods Pro on iPhones, e.g. seal check, translation, everything in the "accessibility" category: button press duration settings, single-airpod noise-cancelling, etc.
Android obviously is out of the game totally for AirPods - no spacial audio, no changes of ANC, no battery level, but at least ANC modes can be changed on AirPods directly, and button press works to answer calls, and pause/play audio, and also volume control works.
I'm three-generation Airpods Pro (around 5 years) user on Android and Macbook (no iPhone at all). In first and second generation there was a "bug" (or intentional feature) that even when connected to Android, and not being connected to my Mac, the latter was showing the charge level on both Airpods, but at some point it was removed.
In first and second generation I had an issue with one AirPod making strange noises, in both cases even Apple Support at the Genius Bar didn't know what to make out of it that I don't use AirPods with iPhone, but only with a Mac (and Android).
This is patently incorrect. Wife switched from iphone 13 mini to samsung s24, and airpods pro 2nd gen immediately started behaving extremely annoyingly to the point of becoming completely useless for any serious use and she just gave them away to her sister which still is on apple, although she loved them before.
Literally all other earpieces work flawlessly with that phone including dirt cheap chinese stuff, apart from apple.
Now somebody could come and claim multi trillion company couldnt just nail that pesky bluetooth protocol well, but everybody else can do it better than them, including 15 bucks products. Its all by design. They clearly dont need hardware revenue to have products who can compete on open market, they need their closed ecosystem revenue, hence these dirty practices. There is hopefully a billion or ten lawsuit in the making by courts with balls, ie EU.
All the downvotes in the world won't change above.
I have no issues with airpod pros 2 on a nice cheap OnePlus phone. They also pair with my Linux PC through a random Bluetooth dongle and that also works fine.
Just take apple to small claims court. If everyone who is scammed by Apple takes them to small claims they will have an incentive to change. Without this they have -0.00000000000 incentive to do anything. Even a class action suit won't help. The fundamental question is whether Apple should be able to sell products with lock in. Since there is lockin on all Apple products it is not accidental. In my humble opinion only. You, dear reader, work out your own thoughts.
> The fundamental question is whether Apple should be able to sell products with lock in.
Unpopular opinion in these parts, but I think yes, they should be able to (continue) to sell products with lock in.
Where Apple should get in trouble is specifically locking others out, rather than locking their own stuff in. If Apple wants to make a smartwatch that only works with iPhones, fine. What they shouldn't be able to do is block (either intentionally or via undocumented/private APIs and TOS violations) third parties from making a smartwatch for iPhone that can compete on the same playing field as the Apple Watch, with access to all of the same features.
Same goes for all tech companies. If you want to lock-in your own first party products, fine, but you absolutely should not be allowed to lock-out others.
I'm not entirely sure if the distinction you're making exists.
Let's say I'm Samsung and I want to make a phone that works with the Apple Watch. Isn't the Apple Watch locking me out? Apple is preventing third party devices from working with the Apple Watch.
If a company figures out how to make Apple products work with theirs, the line is between whether Apple modifies the firmware or future devices specifically to prevent this from working.
I’m saying it’s fine for Apple to make first party tech that only works either their other tech.
Samsung not being able to make a phone to work with Apples first party accessory isn’t the problem.
The problem is Samsung can’t make a watch that functions on par with the Apple Watch on iPhones.
Having first party, integrated accessories is fine. Locking out third party accessories is the issue.
Whatever Apple makes first party for the iPhone , third parties should also be able to make for the iPhone with the same level of access and functionality.
I think the line between accessory and non-accessory is really slippery. When the iPhone was released, I think it would have been correct to call it an accessory for your computer. When did that change, exactly?
Heck, I don't really think of my Apple Watch as an accessory. Mine has its own LTE connection; it does need to be connected to an iPhone during initial setup, but after that I don't think there's anything stopping me from giving my phone away and using the watch by itself. Many of the children I teach have an Apple Watch but don't own a phone yet.
Could you explain your reasoning? I don’t see any moral difference between deliberately limiting compatibility from the peripheral side and doing so from the “computer” side (i.e., iPhone, iPad, Macintosh). One type of device may produce more inadvertent incompatibilities than the other, but that’s different.
Besides, I think this will create surprise and confusion for less technical users. In my experience, many will blame the incompatibility on whichever device is new, without understanding who is gating out whom. And even for technical users, consider CarPlay and Android Auto: From the phone’s perspective, the car is a peripheral, and that makes sense; but lots of people will still consider the car the “core device.”
I can also confirm the problem on a s23, airpods are the only Bluetooth devices which I've experienced cuts in the middle of the audio, similar to an old school radio
Have you tried with another device or just using a sample size of one?
I'm not a fanboy but I never use Airpods with any Apple product and I can use them properly without any hiccup with several others (windows, linux and android).
I’m pretty much the definition of an Apple fanboy - every device in my house is Apple (because the hardware works, is reliable and it works together). That said, I have one windows machine for work and my AirPods just don’t work with it.
Maybe the issue here is Samsung and not Apple. We owned 2 Samsung smartphone in the last 10 years and both would only accept to charge at a decent speed on with damsung chargers while other smartphones of the household would charge just fine with all of them.
When you pair AirPods with a non-Apple bluetooth device, you lose the automatic device switching is all. You can still "enter and exit" the Apple ecosystem with them by just going into Bluetooth settings and tapping on the AirPods and they'll reconnect to Apple-land and start switching again, and vice versa. Once paired with, say, Windows, it'll auto-connect or you can manually trigger it by just tapping them in Bluetooth settings.
Once paired, AirPods just work like any other bluetooth headphones.
My experience is that high end headphones from v-Moda and Plantronics are better about multi-device use with Windows and iPhone than the Airpods are, with those I can just play on whatever device and the right thing happens almost always.
Not always. My first gen airpods are unable to pair with Samsung phone. It just doesn't see them, regardless of whatever magic combinations of holds and presses I do. Thankfully they do work with my old iPhone, so they are not completely useless, but this is the last Apple branded periphery I will ever buy.
Personally I've tried the ones of my wife on my Galaxy S23 and I have frequent audio cuts, since it's the only Bluetooth device I've ever experienced that, there's some shenanigans for sure in their firmware.
I had a slightly older galaxy as my last android phone, and had this problem with the galaxy buds and with the anker ones I got to replace them. My experience with audio on android (Samsung and pixel) was overwhelmingly “this sucks” so I’m more inclined to blame android than apple here
Personally I never had any audio issues at all apart from pairing (but I also had this issue on iPhone, this is a general case of Bluetooth pairing sucks)
Used mine with a Galaxy S22 for about ~6 months, zero connectivity issues. Also given others also are saying they've had no issues I'd say it's pretty fair to assume this was an isolated problem unrelated to the topic at hand.
Yeah, connected a pair to a 2011 phone with Android 2.x (Gingerbread or something along those lines) just fine. Sound quality was even pretty good to my ears, whatever that bluetooth standard could push through the air
Yeah. I have a set of APP 3 (and previously the 2s) and both worked just fine with my Windows laptop, I use them daily with it and even bounce between Windows & my Apple Devices just fine.
I’ve long found that whole feud and dynamic odd, like humanity could learn some major things about inter-group dynamics and even psychology by studying and unlocking what it’s all about.
You have Apple users just happily going about their day, paying a premium because the things just work well enough together to the point that even the slightest hiccup feels like a major event, but the devices just meld into the background of their life and work.
Meanwhile you have Android, Linux, Windows zealots just brooding in dark corners, audibly grinding their teeth over the happiness and ease in which Apple users go about their day, not having to tinker and adjust and fix things and hunt down drivers and check compatibility and relearn every new device they come in contact with and the 38 different paths to accomplish simple tasks, seething with anger that Apple users don’t want to struggle and suffer too.
It’s just a bit of humor. I repent, I repent. You baby is just as pretty as all the other babies.
My experience, Apple people believe Apple products are flawless and when presented with a problem will find every reason to excuse Apple or say "I never do that".
User: Ran into a printing issue on my Mac
Fan: I never print, my Mac experience is flawless
User: Screen Mirror breaks all the time
Fan: I never use Screen Mirror. My Mac experience is it's flawless
User: For some reason my Airpods lose audio once in a while. The Mac shows they are connected. It shows the volume is up. It shows the video is playing. I end up having to reboot
Fan: You must be holding them wrong.
An old example, a friend with a Mac had trouble connecting to a samba share and blamed windows. It was documented that that was bug in Apple's implementation of the samba protocol. He still blamed the non-apple device. (this was like 2006)
I still see remnents of that today. Mac networking sucks (have 2 M1 Macs) as well as a windows pc. The PC networking is solid, connected to share, it never disconnects. The Macs disconnect constantly when switching VPNs etc. The Finder also often locks up. It's also noticablely slower to browse folders with lots of files.
IDK. I find people who really like Apple to be the most critical of Apple. When things don't work perfectly or something is a little off, they complain because their expectations are so high.
No one really cares that Windows has so many design inconsistencies, but Apple makes a change that isn't 100% consistent and people go crazy.
With that said, I'm like the person described to who you responded to. All my Apple things 'just work' better than any other computing devices I've used in the last 30 years, and I go on about my day not really thinking about it.
BTW, Macs made printing sane. There's a reason the old Windows MCSE tests felt they were 90% about printing problems.
This is also my experience, it's not necessarily Apple fans, people just get used to some garbage but necessary workflow/ritual and forget they are doing it.
I witnessed multiple colleagues and friends, who are avid and experienced MacOS users, struggle with basic tasks like ..finding the window of an open application after it was minimised, fullscreening applications, screensharing. Yet, somehow, none of that registered for them and their experience was still reported as flawless.
It sounds like you’re talking to some rather odd people with a strange combination of hyper devotion to Apple and high tolerance for features simply not working. I have seen plenty of people in the first camp though not nearly as much these days as I did back in the early 2010’s, but the second camp is strange to see given that’s a huge cornerstone of why people buy Apple (“it just works.” Or even the perception that it just works).
Screenshare works perfectly fine in my experience and I’m not really sure what you’re talking about with printing, but everyone’s experience differs I suppose
These are both very long-term games. I think preventing a trade war is definitely better on the short term so I'm not opposed to a softer flavour of these directives (it's not permanent after all, they can be adapted again). Than trying to push all the levers at the same time.
I don't agree there. These tariffs hurt the American people a lot more than they hurt us.
All this is pretty much inspired by the fears of the big car companies. But we're also buying a lot less American cars, Tesla for example has been decimated in Europe. And besides them there's only really Ford.
Besides Trump constantly changes the rules. For example with his 'trade deficit' he's only looking at goods, not services. When you consider the huge amount of money going to Microsoft, AWS, Google, there's not really any deficit. Trump just makes it all up as he goes along. You can't really respond seriously to that because you don't know what will happen tomorrow, he could change his mind again.
This should indeed be reported as illegal product tying to regulators (U.S. FTC/EU Competition commission/others?) so that Apple is legally deterred from breaking this interoperability effort with future AirPods updates.
Worse, now device manufacturers can now make their devices identify as "apple" out of the box and advertise it as "compatibility with Apple AirPods features X, Y, X" and be legally permissible.
It's basically the consequence Google v. Oracle and the cases leading to it.
It’s, hilariously, the opposite: the exposure of this idea makes every other product better and Apple can’t change it (until they do).
Product tying is not a thing you can bypass.
This is idea is independent of whether Apple’s strategy is good or bad, legal or not. Product tying can’t be undermined, or it’s not actually a problem.
Dongle-based license management or DRM isn't the same as product tying; each dongle just validates the license for the use of a piece of software. But forcing customers to only use ink cartridges from a specific brand, deliberately rejecting or invalidating third-party refill options? That is a form of product tying, and it is being deemed illegal in more and more countries.
This sounds like you were making some guesses, which turn out to be incorrect. You are saying that AirPods cannot connect to non-Apple devices, which is untrue. They function as regular Bluetooth headphones for any device.
You said when I asked which should get reported “Whatever is reported to iPhones. It's not an excuse to block non Apple devices from reading battery level”
Exactly how is Apple going to send information to none Apple devices using the BT protocol in a method that they can understand?
Ironically this is the main reason I did not buy AirPods for my Android phone, because they do not support this multi-device, nor advanced features on Android.
If they would be smart, they would financially support this project, as it is going to bring more sales, from users who anyway wouldn't switch to iPhone.
Idk, this is kinda like changing the user agent string to chrome for another browser to show that you have feature parity - it’s a hack but there aren’t good ways to signal which devices support some features of the AirPods.
The referenced Bluetooth bug on the Github readme seems like a pretty good reason. "We don't want to work around or deal with the bugs on other platforms" seems like a reasonable position.
This bug prevents injecting magic handshake that enables all features. It wouldn't be relevant if Apple didn't block these features in the first place.
Btw it's not some magic feature set they spent years to research. Sub $60 Soundcores have most of them if not all.
How was USB C on Apple a “mess” when it came out on the iPhone 14? It supported all of the standard USB protocols - video, networking, mass storage, audio etc.
Yeah, I don't think the connector criticism of Apple really stands up to any scrutiny. 30-pin was strictly better than USB-based solutions when it came out, as was Lightning. They supported both of those for a very long time and kept tons of iDevice accessories around the world functioning.
Yes because Apple has a monopoly on - Bluetooth headphones you can use with Android devices??
Do console makers have to make sure that their accessories work with other consoles? Do TV manufacturers have to ensure their remotes work with other TVs?
And no you never had to buy Apple branded or licensed charging cables.
Hearing aids are highly regulated in many markets, as they are medical devices. Not building and getting certification / approval doe software to support every operating system is far from ”criminal”
Having recently purchased "medical hearing aids" - as a tech user, they are complete garbage and if I did not get a "friends & family" discount, they would have been returned months ago...
I think the point is that selling a medical device that also requires you to use that vendors mobile device or lose access to them is just a little scummy. My motivation to keep using an iPhone shouldn't be that I'd need to buy new hearing aids if I left. Apple knows how this works, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
A set of airpods + the Minimum Viable iPhone to configure the them to work as hearing aids is way cheaper than standalone hearing aids. Regulatory fetishism around "medical devices" is exactly what enabled hearing aids to become a racket and to remain one long after the relevant electronics became a mass-produced consumer product.
Plus - the medical ones are horrible to use with an iPhone - barely enough volume for watching media - and music has absolutely no bass... (plus, they regularly "forget" their bluetooth sync connections...)
This is used to prevent devices that don’t know about those features from accidentally triggering them as they are not per spec (spec lacks way to do many things AirPods do).
And AirPods do connect to non Apple devices. They are just limited to doing what BT spec allows and no more
What do you mean by "multipoint spec"? I have written a few BT stacks (you might have even used one I wrote at one point or another) and I have no idea what you mean by that phrase. Please cite a section of the spec or proper name of what you are talking about.
They support HFP and A2DP and AVRCP, and properly, including all of those features working on android phones and proper switching between them as needed...
The argument (which I assume you deliberately ignored) is that those features, like battery reporting and multi device pairing, are being arbitrarily restricted by Apple to maintain a proprietary ecosystem.
How you could argue that this is a good thing tells me you're either too drunk on the corporate kool-aid or that you have some financial incentive to ignore the obvious problems with these facts.
Either way this is my last message in this thread as googling things for you is a bore.
So show me in the spec where one BT device as seen by the host can report the battery of three different battery levels - ie the case and two ear pieces.
The obvious solution would be to report the lowest number, as multiple replies to you have already proposed, but you again chose to ignore because it doesn't serve your agenda.
This entire thread started with you claiming Apple was somehow trying to prevent issues by hiding these features, and you've twice tried to move the goalposts to irrelevant points when given evidence to the contrary.
If you can't even defend your original position then I have no interest in continuing a discussion with Apple's most useful idiot.
The lowest level of the three is not a useful number. The case serves as a battery pack to recharge the headphones (something I did earlier today while on an international flight).
The reality is the sort of compatibility being talked about is a new feature with design choices, not just unwired functionality.
I'd rather them work on features to report charging time or expected playback time on iOS, or write their own app for Android, than try to arbitrarily increase their bluetooth profile compatibility checklist.
“the lowest number” would be completely useless. What would that tell me? Do I need to charge the case? So I need to put my left pod in the fully charged case? The right one?
The average between the two buds then, and rely on the LED for the case. This isn't that complicated guys, other earbud manufacturers somehow figured it out, I'm sure Apple can too.
Hyper-fixating on an issue with one part of the spec doesn't dismiss the larger problem being discussed. It's baffling (and kind of sad) how hard you guys feel the need to defend a trillion dollar company making obviously anti-consumer decisions.
How does the “average” help? It still isn’t actionable. It doesn’t tell me whether I need to charge my case, put my left AirPod in a fully charged case or put the right AirPod in a fully charged case.
If you know the average of those three, what does it tell you?
What other manufacturers have figured out how to report three devices that represent to a Bluetooth host as one device in a standards conforming way that will work across multiple hosts?
It’s not that I am defending a trillion dollar company - the idea of averaging three completely different devices is non sensical and provides absolutely no benefit to the end user. If you want ti complain about anyone - complain about the standards body.
You, like the person this thread started with, are (deliberately?) missing the fire in the forest because you want to talk about the state of one tree. Yes, the standard should be improved to support multi-part devices, nobody here is arguing against that.
This entire thread started with someone trying to claim that Apple was not in the wrong by restricting these features, of which battery reporting is A SINGLE ONE.
No, I don't have a perfect solution for this one specific part of the problem, but that's also not been the my focus the entire time. Getting dragged into the weeds only serves to distract from the actually important point here, which is that what Apple is doing is anti-consumer.
Let's first agree that Apple should play on even ground with everyone else, and then we can whinge over how to correctly report the battery of three components over a single connection. Yeesh.
Yes because it’s easy as long as you ignore the details. Speaking of which, how do you surface all of the other features of the AirPod using the Bluetooth protocol?
You claimed other manufacturers have “figured this out” - how?
Every single thing that you say Apple should do is about how Apple can do that in a method that conforms to the spec - you kind of have to “fixate” upon the spec if you claim that Apple isn’t conforming to the spec.
The battery reporting is the one you brought up and had only horrible ideas.
A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that breaks in some other way means that you'd have to be entirely bug compatible with iOS's bluetooth implementation.
It not that hard to imagine Apple going out of their way to do something that would break functionality on Android, honestly. Although, I believe Fluoride also is to be blamed here because a simple timeout can not possible cause any issues (it seems that a timeout is there, but never called- at least from my tinkering). I am not planning to spend a single second tracing back the actual problem and suggesting a fix, given that Google just asked me to reproduce twice (!!) and did nothing about it.
when you’ve worked long enough in any given industry you know that all companies "violate" standards to satisfy requirements of their product management.
Apple have been ‘extending’ the Bluetooth stack for quite awhile. They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished (I think some 3rd party hearing aids were also compatible).
I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices.
> They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished
In their defence, they went with Lightning shortly before the USB-C spec was finalized. Then, to avoid their customers being screwed over by constantly changing the connector, they kind of had to stick with it for a decade.
People will complain if they push features that are ahead of the spec, and they'll complain if they let the spec be finalized before they use it. Being guided by "What's the best we can do for UX, assuming out users are our users in every product category we enter" seems to be their reasonable middle ground.
The only reason Apple ditched Lightning port and finally gave USB-C port in the iDevices, is because EU forced Apple to do so. But do you think your oh-so-common USB-C cables will work with a new iPhone?
In my country (India), Apple still doesn't sell charger and cable along with its new iDevices, even though those gadgets are exorbitantly expensive. And Apple doesn't allow custom repair here, even though my country mandated the Right to Repair, like EU did so. My old Mac Mini 2012 is gathering dust in a cupboard, because Apple service center refused to upgrade it to new RAM and new SATA SSD, citing Apple policies.
Couldn't you just upgrade yourself in the pre Apple silicone days?
Like within minutes, with no big changes?
I didn't think it's rare that a company refuses to do any work on devices they no longer support. Their employees will no longer be trained to do this work, hence they'd have a nontrivial chance of causing damages. That's exactly why a right to repair is so important, so that other people can pick up their slack
"Seem". Until they don't. I've had multiple instances of Airpods stopping to connect with phones until I charged them at least once with original Apple cables. They might work fine for months, then stop ehaving unless connected through an all-Apple power pipeline (cable and charger). It's probably firmware updates requiring some sort of validation every now and then.
Sounds like you have a flaky / damaged device or bad cables. If there really was some kind of conspiratorial timer requiring you to use 1P cables it would certainly be documented. Can’t hide that stuff. Loads of people use Apple devices with 3P cables all the time and they work just fine, as long as the cables aren’t junk. There really are quality and capability differences in USB C cables. Just because it looks right and physically connects doesn’t mean it can electrically do all the things.
I know that Apple MFI certified Lightning cables work well with iDevices, but I found that third-party non-MFI-certified Lightning cables to be finicky with iDevices. But I never faced such problem with USB cables for non-Apple devices (Android phones, cameras, etc.).
Apple MFI certifies USB-C cables also, so I'm not sure if it is throttling its iDevices to be finicky with non-MFI USB-C cables.
I know for a fact that Apple did software updates to older iPhones to make them sluggish and drain battery quickly. I realised this when I went to Apple Genius Bar to get my iPhone 7 Plus battery replaced after it started draining too quickly daily, but even with new battery same problem persisted. The friendly staff member unofficially told me it is because of the recent software updates by Apple for older iPhones, and advised not to hold out hope that any future software update will fix the problem. Even a year later, his warning remained true. I gave away the iPhone to my nephew as a backup device for his studies, but he sold it soon, as it was a nightmare to keep charging it frequently.
Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These days, I wouldn't trust Apple with a barge pole, let alone the money from my wallet.
>Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These cases are much less convincing than they may seem if you just take a moment to read about them. iDevices would throttle the cpu to make the battery last longer as it's capacity falls, this kind of throttling is not uncommon and not malicious.
This wasn't misleading, and isn't something that warrants any genuine criticism.
In my experience, the only 2 mobile phone companies whose phones drain battery too fast are Apple and Samsung. Apple does this deliberately for older phones, whereas Samsung has this problem even for new phones.
You will not find this quick battery drain problem in Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, etc. Their phones last several years even with ageing batteries. An 10+ years old Oppo phone I have, still holds almost full charge at idle, throughout the day.
As batteries get older, their capacity to hold charge reduces, but if a phone battery is draining too fast even in idle mode, it is likely due to software, not hardware. And if it is due to software, then the manufacturer company is to blame.
I don't think you can find any evidence of a
Apple actually deliberately doing things to make batteries drain faster on older models.
That would either require hurting the battery life on all models or require distinguishable behaviours that only occur on specific models and would be relatively simple to prove through reverse engineering.
Apple has been fined for the throttling, but hasn't ever been credibly accused of actually deliberately taking steps to reduce battery life on older devices.
That iFixit guide to upgrade the Max Mini is daunting for newbies.
But you've inspired me to gather courage and do the DIY upgrade myself next month during the holidays. No use having a working PC lying unused, merely because it is very sluggish due to old hardware. Wish me luck (for the upgrade), I think I'll need it.
You’re just limiting yourself for no reason. It’s not Apples fault that you are sitting in front of an un-upgraded computer that is tool-less (for one of your tasks, at least) and has step by step instructions meant for beginners.
That's because SMS is a horribly broken, hacky standard, and RCS has to inherit and deal with all the horrifying edge-cases of SMS, MMS, and legacy cruft going back prior to the turn of the millenium.
Then it has to accomodate every other intersted party, many of which hate each other. Apple has always been a bit of an odd duck ("Think Different" has been internalized for some time), but Verizon actively hates OTT messaging as they can't charge for it. Samsung would rather run their own RCS implementation to create and advertise "Samsung RCS", and Google can't push too hard without getting EU attention for antitrust (again).
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for years for multiple reasons, none of which are easy.
The specific issue I'm talking about is how Apple for some reason ties the presence of RCS persistently to a contact that requires the user to manually go in and adjust, otherwise the conversation switches back and forth between SMS and RCS as each participant texts back and forth.
This is a problem no other vendors have, and is solely caused by Apple.
Why is that on Apple instead of the hundreds of other manufacturers and Google? If Google wants a better ecosystem, it’s on them since according to them Android was suppose to be the “definition of open”.
Because while Android is "open", Google has no carrot (Verizon can't charge for OTT messaging and has no major incentive to push it), and no stick (pushing too hard will draw regulators' attention again)
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for several years, and I expect it to stay that way (to your point, I expect it to stay that way even if Apple chips in)
In general, rigidity of stack is a malfeasance. Over protecting the user brings fragility, un-adaptability, that curses the world. Android certainly is a rigid narrow protective stack that refuses to accommodate, again and again. Different genre, but decades latter and it still won't work on many ipv6 networks because for no clearly stated reason it won't support DHCPv6: Android is full of these weirdly unstated "principled" anti-compatibilities, and I can't excuse blaming the devices or networks for being what they are: it's the unbending rigid OS that offends me.
I do rather hope perhaps perhaps perhaps the EU & DMA or other may perhaps bend Apple off their rotten course of making non-standard bespoke systems. It seems like very recently the EU is getting ready to cave & abandon all their demands for trying to use standards, that their fear of the US is about to make them fold on insisting upon better. Demanding Apple stop doing everything in bespoke incompatible ways is something that should have happened a long time ago, imo, and it's so horrifying to see one of the only stands in my lifetime against the propeietarization & domination of systems by a bespoke corporate lord abandoned.
There's some rays of hope here & there. Seemoo Lab has a ton of amazing reverse engineering efforts, figuring out how many many many undocumented locked down Apple systems & protocols work & trying to give control back. This is the highest virtue, the best hacker nature. Here's Open Wireless Link, but they have so many other amazing projects they've similarly figured out out to pry open. Amazing best human spirit.
https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
I doubt it’s for any reason at all. The obvious explanation is that they just developed and tested these extra firmware features against Apple devices because that was the product decision. Since nobody was tasked with targeting Android they might not have even noticed that it wasn’t perfectly spec-compliant if those states were never encountered, nor expected to be encountered.
No there isn’t. I’ve said this a million times before, but usually just downvoted: this is about reducing support costs, not increasing revenue from lock-in. This is not a theory, I’ve sat in meetings at Cupertino and been told first hand.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
That's tautological. Everything that is not supported is so because supporting it has a cost. The question is what is the cost? It seems quite obvious that the marginal revenue from airpods would be overshadowed by the revenue of getting a user in the ecosystem.
Having to test the AirPods with more standards compliant devices, having to waste time to tell customers to fuck off if their phone/laptop/toaster is not standards compliant, having to waste engineering time to investigate non compliant aliexpress phones/laptops/toasters, wasting time to implement additional functionality for Apple customers because it has to go into the spec first
Yes, all that is a part of the cost equation, which points to the same thing, namely, that $200-$300 widgets are not worth selling to the general public; they would rather sell them to a customer who will spend a lot more in the ecosystem. Same as razors and blades or consoles and games.
Customer support costs are higher at Apple than its competitors, because they provide a better support experience. This is not a tautology, it’s one of their core value propositions
They couldn't just write (and make people aware at point of sale, ofc) 'no support for using devices with non-Apple Computers products' into Apple Care. They had to purposely break compatibility?
You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
> Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
It reminds me of the USB keyboard extender that came with old Macs. There’s a little notch in the socket so you can only use it with Apple keyboards. At the time I thought it was a petty way of preventing you from using it with any other device, but apparently the reason they didn’t want you to use it with other devices is because the cable didn’t comply with the USB spec.
Yes, USB extenders are not spec-legal (because the device isn't built expecting to be extended).
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
As someone who's implemented custom Bluetooth protocols, it's actually quite easy to condemn an Apple manufacturer ID check to expose custom services.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Every time someone opens an argument with the classic appeal to authority “as someone who has…” you can almost certainly expect to have that person miss the point of the discussion entirely.
Google works around a ton of out-of-spec hardware / driver quirks for Android's ExoPlayer media player stack. So it is more than reasonable to expect Google to add a workaround for this.
Any idea how much latency there is between the beginning of audio being played in an app, and it then coming out the headset?
I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds.
Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.
> I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing.
1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use.
FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency.
If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
Thank you. I actually have since switched devices, but have not yet tested on the new device. The old device was a flagship phone, the Note 10 Lite. That phone served me well for four years, I'll test on the S24 Ultra that just replaced it. Thank you.
This is your host idling the connection due to the silence. Just keep something playing (like a stream of almost-silence) on loop and you won't have this problem.
Most reviewers are already utterly unable to measure "normal" latency. In the very ridiculous chance you'll find a reviewer measuring wake up latency (which has little to do with the codec used), I wouldn't even trust it.
Yes, wake up latency is going to be a crapshoot, but you can eliminate it by playing a silent file at the expense of battery life. Actual latency though there's nothing you can do about it, so it's more important imo.
That's probably some sort of gate on your headphones that silences audio (by killing power to the amplifier circuitry) if it's below a threshold loudness level, to prevent users from hearing a hissing sound the cheap circuitry produces that is otherwise masked by other louder sounds. When gate opens again, it takes 1-2 seconds for the amplifier to power up completely.
It's not really hard to reverse engineer AirPods. Just watch the bluetooth communication between a mac and the AirPods, turn specific features on/off, see how it reacts, then replicate exactly. I wanted to do it myself but saw something like this already exists (librepods, previously called "Airpods like normal (aln)").
That is such a typical bug report to a large company. A user who spent a lot of time debugging and finding the root cause of an issue, and a few faceless peons at the large company spending a few minutes on it, realizing it’s not a priority, and abandoning it.
Not really. There wasn’t a true patch attempt submitted, as far as I can see. There was some helpful info about how commenting out a couple lines could work around the issue, but doing a real engineering evaluation to check spec compliance and make sure it’s all covered in the Bluetooth testing infrastructure is a much bigger task.
And not a small bug either. This large an interoperability issue and it takes a nerd not in the employ of Google to fix their shit? This is why Apple's vertical integration makes it one of richest companies in the world. Google's only up there because of their success in that one business of theirs.
What does Apple being Apple have to do with Google not paying somebody to work on getting Airpods, which presumably should conform to some Bluetooth spec, in order to get Airpods to work on Android?
>>...due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation.
The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee.
We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up.
Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.
> Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth.
They won't, because it turns out Bluetooth is the best thing we have at "discover nearby devices". Guess how Apple TV/screen sharing detection, iPhone hotspot detection and configuration, AirDrop and a whole host of other features work without communicating via some cloud mothership? They are all using Bluetooth to do detection and negotiation to a high-bandwidth link!
Amongst widespread radio communication mechanisms, there are only NFC, Bluetooth and WiFi. NFC is sometimes used to provision wifi passwords, but it's short-range to the tune of a few cm tops. WiFi has discovery, but nothing in the protocol to make sure initial conversations cannot be eavesdropped, and low-power wifi stacks are hard to do, in contrast to Bluetooth with BTLE.
That's what I'm saying. Adobe ends BT support in all their devices and software stacks and switches to "Appletooth," which they promise to open up and then 5 years later actually do it.
Appletooth being a from-scratch all-new, cleanly-designed protocol that makes actual sense and is easy to implement by vendors without inherent security flaws.
I won't lie, it would be a horrifically painful transition. But it would be worth it. Apple should have some courage when it's actually called for (...not killing hardware ports, which no consumer was asking for).
I've never used iPhones and have stuck by Google Pixel. I still feel all of the above in my heart. Apple's the only one who can possibly fulfill my dream of Bluetooth's bitter end.
Adobe Animate (née Flash) still exists and exports HTML5-ready MP4s now. Which, as an actual user of Macromedia Flash and dabbler in Newgrounds uploads, is a much better situation. Flash the plugin sucked shit and everyone knew it, including Tom Fulp.
Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.
I’m amazed by the retconning of Flash into a great system.
I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.
It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.
Adobe said it was only because of mean old Apple that they couldn’t get it to run on the original iPhone. When it finally came to Android around 2010, it barely ran on a 1Ghz Android phone with 1GB of RAM.
Mind you that the first iPhone cake with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz processor.
An iPhone with the theoretical specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Also see the first “iPad Killer” the Motorola Xoom’s marquee feature was suppose to be that it could run Flash. But Adobe was late releasing the Xoom in the unenviable problem of that you couldn’t view its home page on the device.
Nah, Flash was awful. Terrible performance on low end devices. Unforgivably terrible for web video. Nightmare on Linux. Nightmare in enterprise environments.
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).
This take doesn’t make sense unless you’re comparing Flash to current technology, rather than the tech of its time. It’s like saying CD players were awful: sure they’re awful NOW, but they had a time and a place when they were the coolest thing around.
Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).
Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.
It’s one of the topics I feel I’m too biased since I spend 10 years as a flash developer. The requests for widgets and or small applications we got where simply impossible to write in a frontend only fashion at the time. And a lot of my peers moved on to work on HTML5 which was pushed hard as the successor at the time. A lot felt like a step back. I moved to native iOS and worked on games in cocoa 2D. I remember that I thought more than once: “This was already solved in flash”. But I think in the end it’s a good thing that we don’t have or need the flash player anymore. I wish only we could have gotten a flash to wasm/webgl compiler or flash to js transpiler.
ActionScript 3 was great and leagues ahead of JavaScript at the time.
Yup, this was my career path as well. I worked professionally as a Flash developer for many years but gradually that became more of an iOS developer role and I made games using Cocos2D etc.
No, I’m talking about at the time. CD players were great at the time, so I don’t really see your analogy. Maybe the closest thing would be those brittle CD jewel cases, those always sucked!
If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow
As someone who did a bunch of work on Ruffle a while back, "mercy kill" is almost the correct word. There's about a decade it spent rotting before the actual kill, and Apple's not the one who fired the final shot. I've heard stories from both the Apple and Adobe side on this, but basically both companies wanted Flash on iOS and neither of them were capable of actually shipping a good version of it.
Apple begged Adobe to ship a working Flash mobile build at least four times and each time they rejected it for all sorts of various UX or performance issues. At one point Apple asked for and was delivered Flash Player source code, which they reportedly couldn't get to compile. Adobe tried to brand Flash as an open standard, and then went over Apple's head by just shipping an AIR runtime that could be packaged into an IPA and submitted to Apple. Jobs then wrote the infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter, which was really there to justify going scorched-earth and banning all third-party development tools. This only lasted for about three months before the Obama DOJ threatened to sue[0].
Also, Steve Jobs was probably pissed off that he couldn't get the CEO of Adobe on speed-dial. At that point in time everyone involved with shipping iPhone software was in his contacts and in regular contact with him. Google logo looks weird on the phone screen? Have Jobs call Page and get it fixed in 10 minutes.
As it stood after that moment, Flash was a viable development platform for iPhone apps and remained so for many years. This is entirely separate from its use in the browser. Practically speaking, you have probably played plenty of Flash games on iOS without even knowing it, because all the hard work of building touch-friendly UX and a performant UI was shunted over to the developers of individual games rather than trying to make, say, the core Flash rendering model GPU capable[1].
Adobe then shipped Flash Player for Android to huge fanfare, and it sucked just as hard as it did on Apple's dev iPhones and was unceremoniously canned a year later.
At this point it was obvious Flash Player needed a rewrite, even within Adobe, so they announced "FP Next" along with an AS4 language for new movies to run in. Except the Adobe execs were angry about the cost so they tried to shake down their customers for the funds. They wanted any cross-compiled 3D engine code to have to pay a revshare to Adobe. Everyone jumped ship to Unity, so Adobe canned the revshare requirement... and FP Next/AS4, the thing that was supposed to modernize Flash's aging codebase.
And then right after Adobe starts disinvesting from Flash, a bunch of CVEs land and all the browser vendors pushed hard to actually, once and for all, excise plugins from the browser. That was the actual mercy kill, but it was preceded by almost a decade in which all the people who knew how Flash actually worked didn't have the budget to fix it, and all the people who wanted it fixed didn't have the expertise to do it.
[0] For the record, Obama was the guy who saw Zuckerberg illegally buying Instagram to keep people from moving off of Facebook and said "sure thing, wave it through".
[1] There's an AS3 project called Starling that gives you hardware rendering by pre-rendering a bunch of assets in advance into bitmaps, which kind of betrays the whole point of Flash. But I also can't imagine Adobe doing it any other way as the Flash renderer was both highly optimized and bespoke.
By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at.
In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
What realllly irks me is that Apple did not even make the new AirPods Pro 3 backwards compatible with iOS 18. Features that are available with the AirPods Pro 2 on iOS 18 were not available with the APP3. SAME iOS device, SAME H2 chip, but I was forced to upgrade to (the dumptser fire of a release) iOS 26 to maintain feature parity with the APP2 in an all Apple ecosystem.
So f*ing steamed. Still. And Apple support had no clue and kept telling me it should all 'Just Work'.
Mark Zuckerberg explicitly called out the airpod pairing being closed as unfair in a semi recent interview, maybe he can throw some dollars that way and get it all working nicely in some meta products.
It's not AirPods being closed that's unfair. Apple should be able to sell first party tech that only works with their own products.
What's unfair is Apple locking everyone else out. Not allowing or documenting for third parties to use the same APIs to enable something like automatic device switching in third party bluetooth headphones is the unfair part.
Same goes for the watch. That the Apple Watch only works with iPhone isn't the problem. The problem is no other third party is able to make a smartwatch that competes on an level playing field with the Apple Watch on Apple Devices, because Apple locks them out.
By locking their products "in", they're also locking third parties "out". How on earth would they be able to "lock-in" the Apple Watch to the iPhone while at the same time NOT "locking-out" third parties?
I think they're suggesting that lock in implies apple didn't write the code to help support 3rd parties. Lock out implies they actively wrote code to prevent 3rd parties.
With other companies there may be a difference. But with Apple, for all intents and purposes, it's the same thing. Because they are hostile to third-party integration using undocumented API's or interfaces.
I'm not the person you're asking to but this is my reasoning:
1. If I'm building a gadget for my line of products, I want to be able to test it only with my products. I don't want to spend money to make it work with anybody's else products. There are standards but there are bugs and non compliant products from known and unknown parties, their problems.
2. However I might also want to be able to build gadgets for somebody's else products, so I appreciate if those companies stick to standards and don't go out of their ways to make their products incompatible with gadgets of third parties. BTW, this reminds me about cartridges for inkjet printers.
So I think that it would be fair for Apple to say, "these earpieces are tested to work only on these products of mine: ...; if they happen to work on something else: congratulations! you got lucky."
It won't be fair if they make their products incompatible with every other earpieces and at the same time claim that they are compliant to a standard.
…unless someone has sufficient time and/or money to spend on it, and wants to do so as a point of principle.
If I had large amounts of spare money, I’d love to seed small endeavours that (according to my personal world view) made the world incrementally better.
As has been noted before, what’s the point of having ‘FU money’ if you don’t use it to say ‘FU’ now and again?
Yeah, but saying "maybe super rich people will do random illogical things" isn't really a great argument. For all we know, Mark Zuckerberg wants to spend his "fuck you" money locking the ecosystem down even more, as a "fuck you" to consumers.
Cool project, not cool that it needs to exist. Apple isn’t only content to leech off OSS software, they have to force the existence of more of it to workaround what they closed off.
To be clear, you can use AirPods with an Android device for audio.
It’s the extra convenience features integrated into iOS and macOS to change certain settings that have been reverse engineered here. And you can’t actually even use them without rooting your phone and applying a patch to Android’s Bluetooth stack.
A device sold not in small part due to its noise cancelling ability, yet having no way to turn it on/off when connected to Android is not an extra convenience feature.
It’s exactly the same to try to use pixel buds on an Apple phone too. I don’t blame Apple or Google so much as the ridiculous pissing matches of a society that refuses to find ways to cooperate efficiently. So much energy is wasted in the name of vendor lock-in and related. Would it take more energy for Google and Apple to share in expanding into the Bluetooth capabilities in a shared way? Sure for their developers, in the short run. In less than a year the society wide savings far outweighs that. Apple people might cross pollinate and buy pixel buds. Android people will get airpods. Both companies could make even more money and save us all sanity. But we are organized for short term gains. Gradient descent without knowing or using the topology of the global complex. This isn’t Apple or Google’s job to fix, not even the government. it’s an issue at the social fabric level to have deep conscientiousness… so none of this is ever gonna change in our lives.
Seeing how much effort this takes makes me feel vindicated for never buying in to the wireless-earbud trend at all. I love love love having one of the few modern Androids with a real TRRS jack (REDMAGIC 9S Pro) and wired earbuds (Etymōtic ER4XR), that I never need to charge, that can't get lost, and that can't spy on me: https://i.imgur.com/4yymgYO.jpeg
What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world. Ear Detection? My phone does the same thing with my default music app when it detects the jack plugged back in. Multiple devices (up to two)? lol. Head Gestures? How many people even answer the phone at all now after years of relentless spam? Conversational Awareness? I got a $3 clip to attach the wire to my shirt collar, and if I talk to someone or someone talks to me I yank one or both buds out and let them dangle freely with no worry of getting lost or stolen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BL44TW4
I would be totally down to adopt a new paradigm if it was actually better in any way I cared about, but it's just not and never was. People seem to like 'em a lot, though, so I'm still glad to see these supported on non-Apple gear :)
> What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world.
What a silly thing to dismiss a product over. The transparency levels are actually a great feature. You can go from noise cancelling to being able to have a perfect conversation with someone or listen for the kids with a quick squeeze of the earbud. I use it all the time.
Likewise your comment that it’s superior to buy a separate clip and attach the wire to yourself so people can yank them out is just asinine. Or is this parody? It’s hard to tell.
This whole comment feels like someone trying to convince themselves that the thing they didn’t buy is actually terrible and bad, so they can pat themself on the back for not buying it.
It takes effort even for the fanboys, but they are not going to tell you the hoops they jump through even in the Apple Soma Bubble (delete delete "Ecosystem"). You are expected to have the latest semi-broken iOS to even call your latest gen airpods airpods instead of generic bt audio devices lol. Let alone trying to make anything Apple work in Android.
I see the reason to liberate this corporate BT bullshit as a matter of principle, but I don't see the point of Apple fanboys today. In the 90s Apple was light years ahead of wintel, but today they are worse and more expensive than high end brands (etymotic for example) who don't engage in the silly marketing blending of brand and personal self worth the fanboys seem to ingest as if their life depends on it. They strike me as impoverished third worlders who think their internet cred will go up by buying Apple gear. Apple used to really mean "It Just Works", but not anymore by any stretch. On the other hand, the peace of mind of solving a problem for good and forgetting about it, like -radical idea- headphone jacks (removed because "courage"), using a stable environment on a computer you own with an environment you can recreate instead of the Apple merry-go-round, using your own infrastructure and ideas instead of hoping the Apple "Magic" will work when you really need to restore a backup. And when the Apple Machine(TM) eats your superior Apple creations, you simply were holding it wrong, man! Makes me wonder what the rest of the engineering world is thinking... for example, when are HiFi manufacturers going to ditch slimy, unseemly, dusty speaker cables for superior bluetooth sound quality? Why o why are Canon/Sony/Leica/etc still going with environmentally unfriendly, inefficient, heavy and dumb 35 mm image sensors? Don't they know about the miraculous-camera-assembly in iPhones? All 50 MP crammed not in 35 mm but in half the size, now that's sweet!
The idiocies keep coming, like "nano-textured" glass in Apple monitors that simply rehash the professional displays that for years have had accurate color reproduction, superior brightness, and -god forbid- matte screens. I think I must have a long-lost engineering prototype of a monitor with a superior, believed lost forever "nano-textured" glass. It's called matte screen, and it came in the superior display ratio called 16:10 once used by the dinosaurs instead of the retarded craze of everything you can dream of as long as it's 16:9 lol.
Apple fanboys: your identity brand has long since eroded, but by all means keep those credit cards warm, you need to finance the next Tim Cook yatch :)
Unsurprisingly, you cannot assign a single intent to 166k+ people.
Just like Microsoft there are parts of the company who are hostile to open source, and there parts of the company whose success is attributable to open source.
True, but you can compare them to, say, Google, which maintains thriving OSS projects like Chromium and AOSP and generally does a way better job at publishing code and research.
I wouldn’t mention as positive example. I wouldn’t even mention them as example.
Apple cooperates within WebKit well with WebKitGtk. They supported LLVM when it is in their interest.
Chrome is used as proprietary web-engine to vendor lock-in the web. While often used by others, I’m not aware of a broad cooperation. Android is a shadow of Linux, merely using the Linux-Kernel, not GNU. Plus a lot of closed-source code (PlayServices, App Signatures, Google Cloud, Google Apps).
Googles open-source projects seem often exclusive Google only projects? Google works together with others! But especially Chrome and AOSP are…causing worries.
AOSP is the foundation of GrapheneOS, LineageOS and dozens of other patently non-Google systems. Chromium is the foundation for Edge, Brave, Opera, and every single AI browser being churned out by the dozen. Many of the Chromium forks are specifically designed to block Google ads.
There's a reason most of these projects picked AOSP over iOS, or even Chromium over WebKit. Google just engages with the community better than Apple. It's silly to pretend like they're on the same level.
I think it's fair to say Apple's cross platform work is a couple of Android and PC apps, the Mac boot loader, and Swift. Even on this page, Apple seems more like a user of the community projects than a contributor and the Apple projects seem to be for internal use or for Apple platforms. Kind of misses the point in being cross platform the way librepod is aiming to be.
You mean the language that approximately nobody uses outside XCode, which requires you to register an Apple developer account to function? The same language that only switched to an OSS license after they realized nobody wanted to contribute to a proprietary language?
Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.
"[Swift] was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015"
Darwin is also a bad example:
"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"
"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."
Because they show that Darwin may be technically open source, but Apple are horrible stewards of it. It's impossible to actually build a usable operating system from it, which is probably their intent.
They are a leech exactly because they didn't release stuff when given the option. If you're forced to release stuff, that doesn't tell me anything about whether you're a leech or not. Only what you do of your own volition does.
Given that it's already the most upvoted open Android framework bug, and the Google employee it's assigned to hasn't touched it in almost a year, it seems unlikely that more upvotes will make any difference whatsoever.
In such cases it's always better to just open a new identical bug and hope it gets assigned to someone more interested/competent, and no one notices it's a dupe before that.
Another +1 comment under it is far more likely to make more people mute the issue if anything. Spamming "google pls fix" just adds to the noise at this point.
Been using it with my airpods 3 anc on a pixel with custom rom (what a curious setup thinking about it). And it's good enough but kinda annoying the airpods don't seem to save my configs and connection isn't really stable. Not complaining since they're not even supposed to be supported tho, thanks for the free stuff ! I wonder if I'd be able to contribute better support with my very limited knowledge of bluetooth analysis...
hey, do you have the 'act as apple device' hook enabled perhaps? that sometimes causes connections to drop. other than that, i believe i refactored the background service to store metadata about the airpods and support various model types recently which can make the app a bit unstable, hence no new release yet- the build is available to download from Actions. if you're facing unstability on the latest (pre)release, v0.2.0-alpha open a issue, i will have a look whenever i get the time.
about the configs not being saved- do you mean the conversational awareness, adaptive volume etc.? those should be saved, and sent from airpods every time you connect. so if you change the config from any other device, and connect to your phone then the app should show the new config.
you can contirbute by supporting the development, of course! :)
Tunable transparency mode sounds great, and I wish Apple would do something like this as first-party support.
As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.
Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.
I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.
apple doesn't allow much customization, only the 9 presets under accessibility>hearing>headphone accomodation. this eq then also applies to the audio played and transparency settings both. maybe one of those nine presets suits your needs?
I can’t get my Airpods Pro 2 to connect to Mavericks at all for any length of time, this has been driving me nuts for years! They’ll connect and play audio for a few seconds, then cut out, and I’ll have to re-pair to get any audio again.
Check out AirBuddy for something that provides similar control in macOS. Closed source and costs money though. It doesn't need to rely on the reverse engineered protocol, and instead just calls out to macOS APIs to manipulate the Airpods. (I presume)
i don't think macos allows l2cap connections (the protocol that airpods use), at least pybluez doesn't support that on macos which would've made making a simple script a lot simpler.
You're right that the text you're thinking of used to be in that space, if you mean the "About" blurb.
But you're not right about the page contents. The "About" is github metadata, just like the partial commit message "android: multidevice capabilites and accessiblit..." that you can also find. And just like that message, it was full of typos because it's not public-facing.
But there is an actual page talking about the project, which is what we're all commenting on here, and which never contained the typo.
specifically, configuring noise cancelation or transparency mode, as well as multiple different profiles for microphone usage. plus buttons on the airpods themselves.
Still baffles me why the first gen airpod "button" wasn't the winner, but unfortunately Steve's no longer with us.
Apple doesn’t make anything that’s “just <standard protocol>”.
Something needs to make it very expensive and feel exclusive… Yes, you can have AirPods with noise cancellation, but you need a 1k€ iPhone to go with that.
AirPods noise cancellation can be controlled by holding the AirPod stalk.
And that’s not an excuse or a workaround: That’s how I always do it. I’ve never bothered doing it through software on my iDevices, because that’s much more cumbersome.
I think the parent was being sarcastic, because while you can trigger some function on the AirPods themselves, a large list of features are unavailable, not documented and purposefully concealed (as the main post describes in detail). AirPods don't even report their battery life to third party devices (as normal Bluetooth accessories can)
Yes it does. I have Airpod 4 ANC connected to a Samsung Galaxy S24 as we speak and I cycle between ANC and Transparency mode frequently by squeezing the stalk.
This is misinformation. I change anc modes using the air pod while connected to my non root android device. The anc works identically when connected to an Apple device
see MagicPods. although, it's paid, and requires windows to be in test mode to install a driver for L2CAP support. microsoft has decided to not allow l2c for userspace applications.
I've wanted to try AirPods for my dad as hearing aids, but haven't done so because he would have to have the iPhone on hand. He's too old and blind to operate an iPhone. Can anyone here tell me how to take this awesome repo and make a hearing aid possibility for him with a simpler interface?
setting up hearing aids is a one time thing. then, the main adjustment is the amplification, which can be controlled by swiping on the stem. there is no need for an iphone for using it as hearing aids.
hmmm... so, I have been tempted to investigate Airpods for heading aid use, as the "medical" ones I have now are complete garbage for doing anything on my phone - they regularly forget their bluetooth sync status, they do not have enough volume to watch media on the phone - and when it comes to music, they are laughably horrible.
But... in my country, Apple Airpods are not certified as "hearing aids", so that functionality is blocked... Perhaps with this, I will have an Android phone in my future...
This is needed even if you are IN the Apple ecosystem. I don't want to upgrade my phone to the latest half-baked iOS version, so Apple purposefully degrades the functionality of my new AirPods 3. Siri won't switch noise cancellation modes, I can't see the battery status, they get relegated to the "generic bluetooth device" section, and even the battery widget will display three identical headphone icons for headphones and the case.
How do I know this is done purposefully and not just because AirPods 3 are so new and different from AirPods 2? Well, macOS has been neglected of late, and Apple didn't find the time to break things there, so Airpods 3 work with macOS just as well as Airpods 2 did — switching modes, battery status display, etc.
It's very disappointing, and not a great customer experience.
I have been slowly moving away from Apple devices and the 15 Pro will likely be my last iPhone.
The “it just works” argument keeps falling apart.
I’ve already moved over to Linux for my laptop and desktop experience. I only use my iPad to remote into my desktop at this point and use it as my travel laptop. Turns out I don’t really need an iPad.
I’m trying to connect my airports pro 2 to my old, old 2011 iPod. It’s not going very well.
While I haven’t managed to find anything close to an answer using google, chatgpt is quite confident it’s because of Bluetooth versions.
Surely Bluetooth 5 is backwards compatible, but then again if the AirPods thinks it’s connected to an iOS device it seems reasonable that it will start using all the proprietary iOS features and then communication breaks down.
So to me, liberation of airpods is an on-device issue.
It seems to let you access head tracking data, so now I'm really curious if it would be accurate enough to use with games (eg, microsoft flight sim/arma 3/euro truck simulator 2 head tracking). There is probably a lot of other interesting use cases for it too, but I'm stuck with windows for now so :(
the head gestures is something i couldn't quite figure out, so the gesture logic is completely AI generated. i don't know how to get the actual values from the sensors. but there sure is a use in gaming.
Tangent, sound does take knowledge obv to setup to sound good.
I remember flashing the Pine64 Pine Buds and man I could not get them to sound right aside from the original settings. They were not great to begin with but yeah.
Apart from being absolutely unusable on any actually used Android phone, very weird that the author didnt bother to have any write up of how they actually did this, not really sure if its a rip off of the CAPods repo, will have to confirm that later
A lot of Apple products are designed to best work with other Apple products, that's part of their selling point. Would it not be easier to just buy non Apple headphones if you are not in the Apple eco system?
No, they’re designed to work worse with non-Apple products to keep people in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, if you’re not already in the ecosystem it does make sense to buy other products. But if you already own AirPods then you’re reluctant to switch to Android or Linux/Windows, because you either have a degraded experience or have to shell out for new stuff.
It’s convenient only as long you stick to their closed ecosystem. Requiring a device to identify as an Apple device to expose all features is an anti-feature. The devices should expose all features regardless, and leave it to the device/platform vendor to implement the config software.
If it’s vertical integration producing results, that’s all right.
If it’s consciously kneecapping the device for all manufacturers except yours, it’s not a practice beneficial to anyone but monopolies, so consumer laws should prevent it.
This repo seems to prove the case of AirPods is closer to the latter.
“Work best” is giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here. The point of standards like Bluetooth is to avoid vendor lock-in and promote interoperability. If Apple chooses to leverage the spec to produce a product that has degraded functionality when used with other vendors, that goes against the spirit of the spec and makes it worthless.
You might argue, well why did Apple choose to use Bluetooth at all if they’re not going to participate in the interoperability motive? Because initially (think early iPhones) Apple did not design wireless communication modules and benefits from buying COTS from existing vendors.
So would it be easier to just participate in vendor lock-in? Let me ask you, do you enjoy being able to fill up a car at any gas station, or charge your car at any 120V outlet? Standards usually benefit everyone.
Yet if someone likes the sound quality, fit, or ANC of AirPods (which are genuinely good), why should they lose out on functionality just because they're not using an iPhone?
I'm all for everything being compatible with everything, but why should apple invest resources in testing/debugging android compatibility for something that they make?
There is a vast difference between testing and debugging and not intentionally making your product worse when on a standard BT connection which is basically what Apple is doing.
There is zero business sense in making it work as good on non Apple phones. There are plenty of other headphones to choose from that work well with android etc.
I decided to not buy another iPhone when I changed phone because I dislike how Apple both overprices the phone in Europe yet refuse to ship features and keep lying through their teeth about the impact of regulation. I would still like to keep using my AirPods which work fine and I have already paid.
Hi. I'm not here to troll. This is an amazing project. Why did they select AGPL license over just plain ol' GPL? It seems hard to imagine where the "A" is useful for this software.
Lots of folks see the network provisions of AGPL as kind of like the anti-tivoization clause in GPLv3. I.e. patching flaws / loopholes found in GPLv2. In that sense, AGPLv3 is "the most GPL" that can be GPL'd and so it is attractive to folks who lean in that licensing direction. Never know how code will be put to use in the future.
The developer here- I didn't plan to release an app for android, or even linux. The android app just started out as a personal project. My plan was to make a service for linux that can talk to various headphones, and any UI can talk to the service. And this was supposed to be under AGPL. But, as I graudally reverse-engineered most of the protocol from the bluetooth stack on macOS, I decided to release the app for Android and make one for linux as well.
Going to change it to GPL, though. never paid attention to the license in use as I developed.
Thanks for the direct reply. I didn't consider the SaaS angle when I wrote my original post. As a result, your initial license choice makes sense. Also, if you are in control of copyright for all of the source code, then you can easily change the license. I am still blown away by how you did it. It must have been a lot of reverse engineering! Hats off -- keep up the good work.
Will it mean if my kid travels with their phone (Android) and their AirPods and me/my phone (Android), I won't get a message about being tracked anymore?
Companies are doing some crazy stuff to block other devices. One of the worst things that I have seen is that on MacOS you cannot use the AirPods in a Microsoft Teams call.
I’ve used virtually every version of AirPods with Microsoft teams, including AirPod maxes. I use AirPods with teams calls every day.
Let’s definitely not pretend like Teams isn’t the crappiest app in the Milky Way. Any user issues can be squarely placed on Microsoft teams with confidence. Actual garbage app.
Seconding the other user saying that I also use AirPods Pro (2nd gen) in Teams at least twice a day, on macOS, iOS, and Windows (and had used them on android before, as well). Absolutely no issue whatsoever, and everyone mentions I usually have by far the best audio out of anyone else in the call.
What would Apple even gain out of this? They don’t have a competitor to MS Teams, FaceTime is hardly targeting the same segment.
Huh? I was always able to use AirPods with the Nintendo Switch, for example. Even share them with friends' phones. I didn't know they required "liberating" but good news I suppose.
I wonder why people keep pouring energy into this bottomless pit of a vendor locker.
Surely, Apple will close this hole in the next version.
They're a user-hostile company. I stopped bothering with it years ago.
Yes, their hardware might be slightly better than the competition, but the difference is not earth-shattering. Certainly not worth all the trouble and uncertainty of what will happen next year when Apple improves their vendor locking.
My advice: stop feeding the beast, and start owning your hardware!
From a bit further down the page
> Bluetooth DID (Device Identification) Hook > Turns out, if you change the manufacturerid to that of Apple, you get access to several special features!
I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body. Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices; pretend you're an iPhone and you're in.
EDIT: read "unable to connect" => "unable to expose advanced functionality", ofc they connect just fine
AirPods can connect to any device and perform on par with other Bluetooth headphones. This is about availability of special features which require a dedicated driver non-Apple devices are not expected to have.
They don't report battery status to non-Apple devices. This is a pretty basic feature and without this I wouldn't consider them to perform "on par" with other Bluetooth headphones.
You're proving the parent commenter's point that "this is about availability of special features which require a dedicated driver non-Apple devices are not expected to have", because there is no standard way in BLE to report more than one battery value. Wireless earbuds are a device pair, each with its own battery.
Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP AT+IPHONEACCEV` standard for reporting battery levels to the OS.
> Apple, like every other vendor, does not have a choice but to implement this as a proprietary characteristic. Pre-BLE, other vendors copied Apple's de-facto `HFP
They could publish the details, and not block other manufacturer details, so that it is easier for other platforms to develop drivers for them. Or develop a new standard that works for their earbuds.
Or… just report whichever one is lower, which is the value 99% of people care about 99% of The time.
I use mine in meetings and often end up in a situation where I need to remove and charge the one which is about to go flat for a few minutes.
I need to know individual levels to do that
I often use just one of them, and then I want to know that one‘s battery.
If you're only using one, it seems fine to have only one battery level report. I don't see the problem
No, in that case they'd want both to be reported separately so they could use the AirPod with the higher charge.
whichever one you're using will be reporting its battery level. if you want to know the other one, swap them around.
why would apple do this? it's all cost and no benefit.
companies actually can build and ship stuff that isn't inter-operable with the world, this is Actually Good for user experience
> why would apple do this? it's all cost and no benefit.
Imagine if every human on the planet would operate like this.
We'd be back in the Stone Ages.
> companies actually can build and ship stuff that isn't inter-operable with the world, this is Actually Good for user experience
...
what? stone ages?
god forbid someone prioritize concrete user experience over abstract interoperability
Also if the README is to be believed the following are also hidden behind an Apple DID (not driver):
- Multi-device Connectivity
- Accessibility Settings and Hearing Aid
While the following are exclusive to Apple devices for market reasons:
- Receive Battery Information
- Set/Receive ANC Modes
- Set Adaptive Audio Noise settings
- Receive In-Ear detection Status
- Personalized Volume (use at your own risk - might randomly boost volume to some high level)
- Conversational Awareness
- Ear Detection
- Siri (Voice assistant on long stem press)
- Hold and Press configuration
- Head Tracking (for Spatial Audio and Head Gestures)
- Rename AirPods
https://github.com/kavishdevar/librepods/issues/20
I imagine limiting such features to Apple devices is more about incentivizing the Apple Ecosystem than quality or software concerns
I wonder how well that conversation detection works. Does it really help in a loud environment?
As a neurodivergent person I lack the innate human skill to filter voices out of a cacaphony of noise so loud bars etc are hell. There also the "talking with earphones in is rude" but that's an issue that can just be explained.
Needing root to enable it is a major deal-breaker though :( and moving to an iPhone is impossible for me. Too much stuff that's not supported.
Or Apple just doesn't want to bother with the nightmare of supplying and supporting an app to do all those things on other platforms, and in particular, there are regulatory approvals around the "hearing aid" feature that would pretty much require a specific device.
They have a basic app for some of their other devices like the Beats line. One other thing you simply can't do without pairing AirPods with an Apple device is enrol them in AppleCare One.
You're commenting on a post where a random guy provides this "nightmare of supplying and supporting an app" in his spare time, except he actually has to work around Apple's malicious obfuscation and standards non-compliance, so it would actually be way easier for Apple to do it themselves.
Except if you read the page this links to, for Android you need a rooted device only and you want Apple to make software with those requirements.
From what it says, a rooted device is required because Apple made them behave differently depending on the host. Apple wouldn't have needed a rooted Android device to support all the features.
Are you saying this would the first time an unpaid open source effort has done something a big company declined to do because of the operational costs they face?
It is in fact significantly harder for Apple. Because nobody expects random spare time GitHub project to work perfectly. Or even very well. Apple’s reputation, and trillion dollar market value, is based on the idea that their stuff works perfectly.
good god man, just accept that this is objectively an EXTREMELY easy thing to do for anyone. Yes theoretically there are things that are easier for OSS devs than large companies, THIS AIN'T ONE OF THEM.
Ugh, trillion dollar market value doesn't mean they are incapable of making a basic android app. Check their move to ios app if you have any doubts.
It doesn’t matter how frustrated you get or how many times you write capital letters, Apple is a private company and can do exactly what they want to do. If you would like Apple to do your bidding, acquire a controlling interest - it’s public so there’s nothing stopping you.
> acquire a controlling interest - it’s public so there’s nothing stopping you.
Except for the biggest obstacle of it all in capitalism: capital.
If that's the only way anyone can try to change companies' behaviours we are in a lot of trouble :)
Welcome to this argument which is about how easy/hard it might be for a company to implement this particular feature.
The argument about whether they ought to is in some other thread I imagine, you might have lost your way. I don't own their airpods so in this particular instance, IDC about the outcome.
Caps for emphasis, not frustration.
It's not so much an idea, it's more of an illusion. One that Apple marketing spends billions to maintain.
Are you aware they are maintaining multiple complete OSs, and multiple versions of each? With drivers for hundreds of components? The scope of AirPods on Android is laughable in comparison.
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"?
Because what's the point in having 'fuck you' money if you never get to say 'fuck you?'
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.
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...
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...
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.
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."
1.0 says:
1.1 says: 1.0 was a mess and your anger over a poorly defined and relatively minor feature seems quite misplaced. Bluetooth interoperability has historically been a mess (still is from my experience). But go ahead be big mad that Airpods only play audio from third party devices and don't provide battery status in a way that adheres to a recent revision of the standard. Meanwhile I'm sure Sony would never use a proprietary format ever…I had posted a reply addressing your points, but I don't think this discussion is productive and you don't seem to want to engage honestly with what I'm saying and stay on topic. So I'll just say have a good day.
You're lambasting Apple for not implementing part of a standard that hadn't been standardized.
Nope. Bye!
Stay big mad!
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
What "other platforms" are you talking about? Just an Android app would suffice. It's not a huge deal for a company worth trillions, especially if the features are already there and they're just blocking non-Apple products. If they deliberately do that, it makes you think they don't really care about their customers and are more interested in locking people into their ecosystem.
Not just non-Apple devices. I have a machine with older MacOS and the current Apple keyboard doesn't report battery status. I can't think of a reason why that would work differently from Apple's own older keyboards, but it does.
Actually even within Apple ecosystem not all devices are made equal. MacBooks lack some features available for AirPods Pro on iPhones, e.g. seal check, translation, everything in the "accessibility" category: button press duration settings, single-airpod noise-cancelling, etc.
Android obviously is out of the game totally for AirPods - no spacial audio, no changes of ANC, no battery level, but at least ANC modes can be changed on AirPods directly, and button press works to answer calls, and pause/play audio, and also volume control works.
I'm three-generation Airpods Pro (around 5 years) user on Android and Macbook (no iPhone at all). In first and second generation there was a "bug" (or intentional feature) that even when connected to Android, and not being connected to my Mac, the latter was showing the charge level on both Airpods, but at some point it was removed.
In first and second generation I had an issue with one AirPod making strange noises, in both cases even Apple Support at the Genius Bar didn't know what to make out of it that I don't use AirPods with iPhone, but only with a Mac (and Android).
This is patently incorrect. Wife switched from iphone 13 mini to samsung s24, and airpods pro 2nd gen immediately started behaving extremely annoyingly to the point of becoming completely useless for any serious use and she just gave them away to her sister which still is on apple, although she loved them before.
Literally all other earpieces work flawlessly with that phone including dirt cheap chinese stuff, apart from apple.
Now somebody could come and claim multi trillion company couldnt just nail that pesky bluetooth protocol well, but everybody else can do it better than them, including 15 bucks products. Its all by design. They clearly dont need hardware revenue to have products who can compete on open market, they need their closed ecosystem revenue, hence these dirty practices. There is hopefully a billion or ten lawsuit in the making by courts with balls, ie EU.
All the downvotes in the world won't change above.
I have no issues with airpod pros 2 on a nice cheap OnePlus phone. They also pair with my Linux PC through a random Bluetooth dongle and that also works fine.
Can you see the battery level?
Ah! I cannot. Interesting. What you never had you never miss (-:
Just take apple to small claims court. If everyone who is scammed by Apple takes them to small claims they will have an incentive to change. Without this they have -0.00000000000 incentive to do anything. Even a class action suit won't help. The fundamental question is whether Apple should be able to sell products with lock in. Since there is lockin on all Apple products it is not accidental. In my humble opinion only. You, dear reader, work out your own thoughts.
> Just take apple to small claims court.
You can't do that, you certainly agreed to binding arbitration with apple at some point.
Very American-centric response. You cannot contract out of small claims court exposure in my country.
Go try to actually recover damages from apple and let me know how that goes for you :)
> The fundamental question is whether Apple should be able to sell products with lock in.
Unpopular opinion in these parts, but I think yes, they should be able to (continue) to sell products with lock in.
Where Apple should get in trouble is specifically locking others out, rather than locking their own stuff in. If Apple wants to make a smartwatch that only works with iPhones, fine. What they shouldn't be able to do is block (either intentionally or via undocumented/private APIs and TOS violations) third parties from making a smartwatch for iPhone that can compete on the same playing field as the Apple Watch, with access to all of the same features.
Same goes for all tech companies. If you want to lock-in your own first party products, fine, but you absolutely should not be allowed to lock-out others.
I'm not entirely sure if the distinction you're making exists.
Let's say I'm Samsung and I want to make a phone that works with the Apple Watch. Isn't the Apple Watch locking me out? Apple is preventing third party devices from working with the Apple Watch.
If a company figures out how to make Apple products work with theirs, the line is between whether Apple modifies the firmware or future devices specifically to prevent this from working.
I’m saying it’s fine for Apple to make first party tech that only works either their other tech.
Samsung not being able to make a phone to work with Apples first party accessory isn’t the problem.
The problem is Samsung can’t make a watch that functions on par with the Apple Watch on iPhones.
Having first party, integrated accessories is fine. Locking out third party accessories is the issue.
Whatever Apple makes first party for the iPhone , third parties should also be able to make for the iPhone with the same level of access and functionality.
I think the line between accessory and non-accessory is really slippery. When the iPhone was released, I think it would have been correct to call it an accessory for your computer. When did that change, exactly?
Heck, I don't really think of my Apple Watch as an accessory. Mine has its own LTE connection; it does need to be connected to an iPhone during initial setup, but after that I don't think there's anything stopping me from giving my phone away and using the watch by itself. Many of the children I teach have an Apple Watch but don't own a phone yet.
Could you explain your reasoning? I don’t see any moral difference between deliberately limiting compatibility from the peripheral side and doing so from the “computer” side (i.e., iPhone, iPad, Macintosh). One type of device may produce more inadvertent incompatibilities than the other, but that’s different.
Besides, I think this will create surprise and confusion for less technical users. In my experience, many will blame the incompatibility on whichever device is new, without understanding who is gating out whom. And even for technical users, consider CarPlay and Android Auto: From the phone’s perspective, the car is a peripheral, and that makes sense; but lots of people will still consider the car the “core device.”
I can also confirm the problem on a s23, airpods are the only Bluetooth devices which I've experienced cuts in the middle of the audio, similar to an old school radio
Does turning off the AirPods automatic device switching feature make any difference?
How to do that without an iPhone?
I didn't try but that's a good idea.
Have you tried with another device or just using a sample size of one?
I'm not a fanboy but I never use Airpods with any Apple product and I can use them properly without any hiccup with several others (windows, linux and android).
Maybe there's something up with your phone?
Quite probable that it's the classic Bluetooth issue of devices fighting to see who gets paired to.
My pro 2s worked fine on my S21 and S24 ultra. What annoyed me the most is that they would auto connect to my iPad first (if audio was playing)
I hate to be the Apple fanboy but an anecdote is far from “patently incorrect”. Never had any issues with my AirPods with third-party devices.
I’m pretty much the definition of an Apple fanboy - every device in my house is Apple (because the hardware works, is reliable and it works together). That said, I have one windows machine for work and my AirPods just don’t work with it.
Maybe the issue here is Samsung and not Apple. We owned 2 Samsung smartphone in the last 10 years and both would only accept to charge at a decent speed on with damsung chargers while other smartphones of the household would charge just fine with all of them.
They don't. I love my airpods but it's not viable to use them with anything other than my phone.
What sort of laptop/desktop do you have? I regularly use my AirPods with my Steam Deck and they work great!
Same, use them with my Switch 2 without issues.
Really? Even multi-device connectivity?
When you pair AirPods with a non-Apple bluetooth device, you lose the automatic device switching is all. You can still "enter and exit" the Apple ecosystem with them by just going into Bluetooth settings and tapping on the AirPods and they'll reconnect to Apple-land and start switching again, and vice versa. Once paired with, say, Windows, it'll auto-connect or you can manually trigger it by just tapping them in Bluetooth settings.
Once paired, AirPods just work like any other bluetooth headphones.
I mean ya, if they couldn't do that, then you couldn't even call it Bluetooth.
I was asking about multi-device connectivity, which is a slightly more advanced feature that lots of other earbuds can do in a cross-platform way.
My experience is that high end headphones from v-Moda and Plantronics are better about multi-device use with Windows and iPhone than the Airpods are, with those I can just play on whatever device and the right thing happens almost always.
Doesn't even have to be high-end. My Anker Soundcore headphones seem to always do the right thing with multi-device.
Not always. My first gen airpods are unable to pair with Samsung phone. It just doesn't see them, regardless of whatever magic combinations of holds and presses I do. Thankfully they do work with my old iPhone, so they are not completely useless, but this is the last Apple branded periphery I will ever buy.
Hail Corporate indeed
> Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices
I've had almost all of the versions of AirPods and AirPod Pros and they have connected to non-Apple devices just fine.
I would say they not only just connect, they work perfectly. I can't say the same for Bose and similar devices.
Personally I've tried the ones of my wife on my Galaxy S23 and I have frequent audio cuts, since it's the only Bluetooth device I've ever experienced that, there's some shenanigans for sure in their firmware.
I had a slightly older galaxy as my last android phone, and had this problem with the galaxy buds and with the anker ones I got to replace them. My experience with audio on android (Samsung and pixel) was overwhelmingly “this sucks” so I’m more inclined to blame android than apple here
Personally I never had any audio issues at all apart from pairing (but I also had this issue on iPhone, this is a general case of Bluetooth pairing sucks)
Used mine with a Galaxy S22 for about ~6 months, zero connectivity issues. Also given others also are saying they've had no issues I'd say it's pretty fair to assume this was an isolated problem unrelated to the topic at hand.
Yeah, connected a pair to a 2011 phone with Android 2.x (Gingerbread or something along those lines) just fine. Sound quality was even pretty good to my ears, whatever that bluetooth standard could push through the air
Yeah. I have a set of APP 3 (and previously the 2s) and both worked just fine with my Windows laptop, I use them daily with it and even bounce between Windows & my Apple Devices just fine.
Yup, I've got an old pair connected to my Steam Deck. Works fine.
I have yet to see a single Apple hater who’s ever used Apple devices and knows what he’s talking about.
I’ve long found that whole feud and dynamic odd, like humanity could learn some major things about inter-group dynamics and even psychology by studying and unlocking what it’s all about.
You have Apple users just happily going about their day, paying a premium because the things just work well enough together to the point that even the slightest hiccup feels like a major event, but the devices just meld into the background of their life and work.
Meanwhile you have Android, Linux, Windows zealots just brooding in dark corners, audibly grinding their teeth over the happiness and ease in which Apple users go about their day, not having to tinker and adjust and fix things and hunt down drivers and check compatibility and relearn every new device they come in contact with and the 38 different paths to accomplish simple tasks, seething with anger that Apple users don’t want to struggle and suffer too.
It’s just a bit of humor. I repent, I repent. You baby is just as pretty as all the other babies.
My experience, Apple people believe Apple products are flawless and when presented with a problem will find every reason to excuse Apple or say "I never do that".
User: Ran into a printing issue on my Mac
Fan: I never print, my Mac experience is flawless
User: Screen Mirror breaks all the time
Fan: I never use Screen Mirror. My Mac experience is it's flawless
User: For some reason my Airpods lose audio once in a while. The Mac shows they are connected. It shows the volume is up. It shows the video is playing. I end up having to reboot
Fan: You must be holding them wrong.
An old example, a friend with a Mac had trouble connecting to a samba share and blamed windows. It was documented that that was bug in Apple's implementation of the samba protocol. He still blamed the non-apple device. (this was like 2006)
I still see remnents of that today. Mac networking sucks (have 2 M1 Macs) as well as a windows pc. The PC networking is solid, connected to share, it never disconnects. The Macs disconnect constantly when switching VPNs etc. The Finder also often locks up. It's also noticablely slower to browse folders with lots of files.
IDK. I find people who really like Apple to be the most critical of Apple. When things don't work perfectly or something is a little off, they complain because their expectations are so high.
No one really cares that Windows has so many design inconsistencies, but Apple makes a change that isn't 100% consistent and people go crazy.
With that said, I'm like the person described to who you responded to. All my Apple things 'just work' better than any other computing devices I've used in the last 30 years, and I go on about my day not really thinking about it.
BTW, Macs made printing sane. There's a reason the old Windows MCSE tests felt they were 90% about printing problems.
This is also my experience, it's not necessarily Apple fans, people just get used to some garbage but necessary workflow/ritual and forget they are doing it. I witnessed multiple colleagues and friends, who are avid and experienced MacOS users, struggle with basic tasks like ..finding the window of an open application after it was minimised, fullscreening applications, screensharing. Yet, somehow, none of that registered for them and their experience was still reported as flawless.
> when presented with a problem will find every reason to excuse Apple or say "I never do that"
...or maybe you shouldn't do that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706811
You're absolutely right! Every Apple user knows they shouldn't be holding it wrong.
It sounds like you’re talking to some rather odd people with a strange combination of hyper devotion to Apple and high tolerance for features simply not working. I have seen plenty of people in the first camp though not nearly as much these days as I did back in the early 2010’s, but the second camp is strange to see given that’s a huge cornerstone of why people buy Apple (“it just works.” Or even the perception that it just works).
Screenshare works perfectly fine in my experience and I’m not really sure what you’re talking about with printing, but everyone’s experience differs I suppose
They’re being slammed, the DMA is not going away. Just a few weeks ago, Apple had their latest court hearing.
https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20251015-01.en.html
Well, the EU is trying to undermine its own GDPR now in an attempt to suck up to Trump :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882203
And DMA/DSA are also getting nerfed :(
These are both very long-term games. I think preventing a trade war is definitely better on the short term so I'm not opposed to a softer flavour of these directives (it's not permanent after all, they can be adapted again). Than trying to push all the levers at the same time.
I don't agree there. These tariffs hurt the American people a lot more than they hurt us.
All this is pretty much inspired by the fears of the big car companies. But we're also buying a lot less American cars, Tesla for example has been decimated in Europe. And besides them there's only really Ford.
Besides Trump constantly changes the rules. For example with his 'trade deficit' he's only looking at goods, not services. When you consider the huge amount of money going to Microsoft, AWS, Google, there's not really any deficit. Trump just makes it all up as he goes along. You can't really respond seriously to that because you don't know what will happen tomorrow, he could change his mind again.
This should indeed be reported as illegal product tying to regulators (U.S. FTC/EU Competition commission/others?) so that Apple is legally deterred from breaking this interoperability effort with future AirPods updates.
Worse, now device manufacturers can now make their devices identify as "apple" out of the box and advertise it as "compatibility with Apple AirPods features X, Y, X" and be legally permissible.
It's basically the consequence Google v. Oracle and the cases leading to it.
I think that's against the Bluetooth spec, and if you do that you won't be certified.
like every browser identifying as Mozilla in the user agent
What makes this illegal product tying under specific laws?
It’s, hilariously, the opposite: the exposure of this idea makes every other product better and Apple can’t change it (until they do).
Product tying is not a thing you can bypass.
This is idea is independent of whether Apple’s strategy is good or bad, legal or not. Product tying can’t be undermined, or it’s not actually a problem.
I still don't see the illegal part. I am in VFX and have three dongles connected to use specific software packages...
Dongle-based license management or DRM isn't the same as product tying; each dongle just validates the license for the use of a piece of software. But forcing customers to only use ink cartridges from a specific brand, deliberately rejecting or invalidating third-party refill options? That is a form of product tying, and it is being deemed illegal in more and more countries.
How is Apple forcing anything with AirPods and how is it illegal?
>> I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body.
They should be slammed by Bluetooth body and forbidden to use bluetooth technology for hurting interoperability.
The Bluetooth body should be nuked from orbit for how much they’ve stalled wireless progress.
Like a sumo wrestler slam??
I'm not opposed
This sounds like you were making some guesses, which turn out to be incorrect. You are saying that AirPods cannot connect to non-Apple devices, which is untrue. They function as regular Bluetooth headphones for any device.
They don't function as a regular bt headphone. They don't even report battery life among other artificially blocked basic functions.
Which of the three battery level values should be reported in the one slot Bluetooth provides?
The different devices look like one device by being a "coordinated set" in Bluetooth parlance.
Each member of a coordinated set gets its own Bluetooth battery level slot, so there's no problem here. The spec supports this use case natively.
It seems the the right answer shouldn't be "none of them" though.
So which one should it be?
Whatever is reported to iPhones. It's not an excuse to block non Apple devices from reading battery level
All three get reported to iphones.
That’s not part of the Bluetooth spec to report battery power for three separate batteries on one device. Where would it be reported to?
Yes, that's my point.
If it’s not part of the BT spec - how is Apple going to report three battery levels in a way that’s compatible with non Apple devices?
Again, that's what I'm saying. We are in agreeance but you really seem to want to argue.
You said when I asked which should get reported “Whatever is reported to iPhones. It's not an excuse to block non Apple devices from reading battery level”
Exactly how is Apple going to send information to none Apple devices using the BT protocol in a method that they can understand?
Minimum between L and R.
The lowest one among the two earpieces?
It's not innovation, it's ecosystem control disguised as premium experience
Ironically this is the main reason I did not buy AirPods for my Android phone, because they do not support this multi-device, nor advanced features on Android.
If they would be smart, they would financially support this project, as it is going to bring more sales, from users who anyway wouldn't switch to iPhone.
> Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices
They’ve always been able to.
The ignorance of Apple haters never ceases to amaze.
Idk, this is kinda like changing the user agent string to chrome for another browser to show that you have feature parity - it’s a hack but there aren’t good ways to signal which devices support some features of the AirPods.
They can and should do better though by android.
The referenced Bluetooth bug on the Github readme seems like a pretty good reason. "We don't want to work around or deal with the bugs on other platforms" seems like a reasonable position.
This bug prevents injecting magic handshake that enables all features. It wouldn't be relevant if Apple didn't block these features in the first place.
Btw it's not some magic feature set they spent years to research. Sub $60 Soundcores have most of them if not all.
This is anti-competitive measures, it's not like it's the only thing they do like this. The charging cables were the same.
If this is about lightning, what connector do you think apple should have used? USB-C came out long after lightning.
> USB-C [Aug 2014] came out long after lightning [Sep 2012].
1 year 11 months :)
The old 30-pin connector before Lightning came from 2003.
Meanwhile it took until 2023 for iPhones to use USB-C.
How was USB C on Apple a “mess” when it came out on the iPhone 14? It supported all of the standard USB protocols - video, networking, mass storage, audio etc.
The transition to USB-C was spread out across product lines over many years, hence "mess". The iPhone is on a separate line in the table.
Yeah, I don't think the connector criticism of Apple really stands up to any scrutiny. 30-pin was strictly better than USB-based solutions when it came out, as was Lightning. They supported both of those for a very long time and kept tons of iDevice accessories around the world functioning.
Yes because Apple has a monopoly on - Bluetooth headphones you can use with Android devices??
Do console makers have to make sure that their accessories work with other consoles? Do TV manufacturers have to ensure their remotes work with other TVs?
And no you never had to buy Apple branded or licensed charging cables.
I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body.
Are we really at the point where people expect big brother to handle our headphone issues?
Especially blocking hearing aids features for people who need those should be criminal
Hearing aids are highly regulated in many markets, as they are medical devices. Not building and getting certification / approval doe software to support every operating system is far from ”criminal”
Having recently purchased "medical hearing aids" - as a tech user, they are complete garbage and if I did not get a "friends & family" discount, they would have been returned months ago...
I think the point is that selling a medical device that also requires you to use that vendors mobile device or lose access to them is just a little scummy. My motivation to keep using an iPhone shouldn't be that I'd need to buy new hearing aids if I left. Apple knows how this works, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
A set of airpods + the Minimum Viable iPhone to configure the them to work as hearing aids is way cheaper than standalone hearing aids. Regulatory fetishism around "medical devices" is exactly what enabled hearing aids to become a racket and to remain one long after the relevant electronics became a mass-produced consumer product.
Plus - the medical ones are horrible to use with an iPhone - barely enough volume for watching media - and music has absolutely no bass... (plus, they regularly "forget" their bluetooth sync connections...)
Financially gatekeeping access to vital medical resources is par for the course here in the US
This is used to prevent devices that don’t know about those features from accidentally triggering them as they are not per spec (spec lacks way to do many things AirPods do).
And AirPods do connect to non Apple devices. They are just limited to doing what BT spec allows and no more
Please stop spreading FUD
Multipoint connectivity is part of the spec but apparently AirPods only support it if you pretend to be an Apple device.
part of which spec revision? what date did it come out? and what date did airpods come out. compare the two dates. i'll wait...
The multipoint spec was added to Bluetooth 4.0 in 2010:
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/core-specific...
The Battery Service 1.0 spec was officially adopted in 2011:
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/battery-servi...
The first airpods were released in 2016...
Please consider that simping for a trillion dollar company might actually not be in your best personal interests...
What do you mean by "multipoint spec"? I have written a few BT stacks (you might have even used one I wrote at one point or another) and I have no idea what you mean by that phrase. Please cite a section of the spec or proper name of what you are talking about.
If you're such an expert then you could have likely found this even easier than I did:
https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/multi-profile...
Airpods already do this all...
They support HFP and A2DP and AVRCP, and properly, including all of those features working on android phones and proper switching between them as needed...
The argument (which I assume you deliberately ignored) is that those features, like battery reporting and multi device pairing, are being arbitrarily restricted by Apple to maintain a proprietary ecosystem.
How you could argue that this is a good thing tells me you're either too drunk on the corporate kool-aid or that you have some financial incentive to ignore the obvious problems with these facts.
Either way this is my last message in this thread as googling things for you is a bore.
So show me in the spec where one BT device as seen by the host can report the battery of three different battery levels - ie the case and two ear pieces.
The obvious solution would be to report the lowest number, as multiple replies to you have already proposed, but you again chose to ignore because it doesn't serve your agenda.
This entire thread started with you claiming Apple was somehow trying to prevent issues by hiding these features, and you've twice tried to move the goalposts to irrelevant points when given evidence to the contrary.
If you can't even defend your original position then I have no interest in continuing a discussion with Apple's most useful idiot.
The lowest level of the three is not a useful number. The case serves as a battery pack to recharge the headphones (something I did earlier today while on an international flight).
The reality is the sort of compatibility being talked about is a new feature with design choices, not just unwired functionality.
I'd rather them work on features to report charging time or expected playback time on iOS, or write their own app for Android, than try to arbitrarily increase their bluetooth profile compatibility checklist.
“the lowest number” would be completely useless. What would that tell me? Do I need to charge the case? So I need to put my left pod in the fully charged case? The right one?
The average between the two buds then, and rely on the LED for the case. This isn't that complicated guys, other earbud manufacturers somehow figured it out, I'm sure Apple can too.
Hyper-fixating on an issue with one part of the spec doesn't dismiss the larger problem being discussed. It's baffling (and kind of sad) how hard you guys feel the need to defend a trillion dollar company making obviously anti-consumer decisions.
How does the “average” help? It still isn’t actionable. It doesn’t tell me whether I need to charge my case, put my left AirPod in a fully charged case or put the right AirPod in a fully charged case.
If you know the average of those three, what does it tell you?
What other manufacturers have figured out how to report three devices that represent to a Bluetooth host as one device in a standards conforming way that will work across multiple hosts?
It’s not that I am defending a trillion dollar company - the idea of averaging three completely different devices is non sensical and provides absolutely no benefit to the end user. If you want ti complain about anyone - complain about the standards body.
You, like the person this thread started with, are (deliberately?) missing the fire in the forest because you want to talk about the state of one tree. Yes, the standard should be improved to support multi-part devices, nobody here is arguing against that.
This entire thread started with someone trying to claim that Apple was not in the wrong by restricting these features, of which battery reporting is A SINGLE ONE.
No, I don't have a perfect solution for this one specific part of the problem, but that's also not been the my focus the entire time. Getting dragged into the weeds only serves to distract from the actually important point here, which is that what Apple is doing is anti-consumer.
Let's first agree that Apple should play on even ground with everyone else, and then we can whinge over how to correctly report the battery of three components over a single connection. Yeesh.
Yes because it’s easy as long as you ignore the details. Speaking of which, how do you surface all of the other features of the AirPod using the Bluetooth protocol?
You claimed other manufacturers have “figured this out” - how?
Every single thing that you say Apple should do is about how Apple can do that in a method that conforms to the spec - you kind of have to “fixate” upon the spec if you claim that Apple isn’t conforming to the spec.
The battery reporting is the one you brought up and had only horrible ideas.
No idea what you’re talking about. I’ve connected airpods easily to over a dozen devices without a hitch.
A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
It doesn't seem obvious to me that this is actually a bug in the Android implementation, it seems like this is due to AirPods violating the spec and requiring a special handshake before responding to standard requests. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect Android to work around a device that appears to be intentionally breaking the spec for vendor lock-in purposes: the possibility of them just OTAing an update that breaks in some other way means that you'd have to be entirely bug compatible with iOS's bluetooth implementation.
It not that hard to imagine Apple going out of their way to do something that would break functionality on Android, honestly. Although, I believe Fluoride also is to be blamed here because a simple timeout can not possible cause any issues (it seems that a timeout is there, but never called- at least from my tinkering). I am not planning to spend a single second tracing back the actual problem and suggesting a fix, given that Google just asked me to reproduce twice (!!) and did nothing about it.
when you’ve worked long enough in any given industry you know that all companies "violate" standards to satisfy requirements of their product management.
Apple have been ‘extending’ the Bluetooth stack for quite awhile. They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished (I think some 3rd party hearing aids were also compatible).
I haven’t used non apple earphones for awhile but the seamless connectivity performance of AirPods would suggest this was done for performance, not to deliberately lock in devices.
This 2020 paper is great at breaking down some of the extensions: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot20-paper-heinze.pdf
> They introduced some BLE features before the spec was finished
In their defence, they went with Lightning shortly before the USB-C spec was finalized. Then, to avoid their customers being screwed over by constantly changing the connector, they kind of had to stick with it for a decade.
People will complain if they push features that are ahead of the spec, and they'll complain if they let the spec be finalized before they use it. Being guided by "What's the best we can do for UX, assuming out users are our users in every product category we enter" seems to be their reasonable middle ground.
The only reason Apple ditched Lightning port and finally gave USB-C port in the iDevices, is because EU forced Apple to do so. But do you think your oh-so-common USB-C cables will work with a new iPhone?
In my country (India), Apple still doesn't sell charger and cable along with its new iDevices, even though those gadgets are exorbitantly expensive. And Apple doesn't allow custom repair here, even though my country mandated the Right to Repair, like EU did so. My old Mac Mini 2012 is gathering dust in a cupboard, because Apple service center refused to upgrade it to new RAM and new SATA SSD, citing Apple policies.
Couldn't you just upgrade yourself in the pre Apple silicone days?
Like within minutes, with no big changes?
I didn't think it's rare that a company refuses to do any work on devices they no longer support. Their employees will no longer be trained to do this work, hence they'd have a nontrivial chance of causing damages. That's exactly why a right to repair is so important, so that other people can pick up their slack
Back when RAM and HDD were using standard parts, Apple packaged manuals with documentation as to how to proceed to such upgrades.
The higher end iPads started coming with USB C long before the EU mandate
That seemed like a product segmentation choice to encourage more laptop like use cases out of the higher end iPads.
Less friction for devices like passkeys, external hard drives, etc.
It doesn't seem like they were keen on moving that down the product line since they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so.
That was a much easier way to get usb3 on them than the special lightning port + cables they tried earlier.
>But do you think your oh-so-common USB-C cables will work with a new iPhone?
They seem to work just fine, yeah.
"Seem". Until they don't. I've had multiple instances of Airpods stopping to connect with phones until I charged them at least once with original Apple cables. They might work fine for months, then stop ehaving unless connected through an all-Apple power pipeline (cable and charger). It's probably firmware updates requiring some sort of validation every now and then.
I think this is a problem with USB-C. The cables all look the same, but they don't actually always work for every device, at least in my experience.
Sounds like you have a flaky / damaged device or bad cables. If there really was some kind of conspiratorial timer requiring you to use 1P cables it would certainly be documented. Can’t hide that stuff. Loads of people use Apple devices with 3P cables all the time and they work just fine, as long as the cables aren’t junk. There really are quality and capability differences in USB C cables. Just because it looks right and physically connects doesn’t mean it can electrically do all the things.
I know that Apple MFI certified Lightning cables work well with iDevices, but I found that third-party non-MFI-certified Lightning cables to be finicky with iDevices. But I never faced such problem with USB cables for non-Apple devices (Android phones, cameras, etc.).
Apple MFI certifies USB-C cables also, so I'm not sure if it is throttling its iDevices to be finicky with non-MFI USB-C cables.
I know for a fact that Apple did software updates to older iPhones to make them sluggish and drain battery quickly. I realised this when I went to Apple Genius Bar to get my iPhone 7 Plus battery replaced after it started draining too quickly daily, but even with new battery same problem persisted. The friendly staff member unofficially told me it is because of the recent software updates by Apple for older iPhones, and advised not to hold out hope that any future software update will fix the problem. Even a year later, his warning remained true. I gave away the iPhone to my nephew as a backup device for his studies, but he sold it soon, as it was a nightmare to keep charging it frequently.
Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These days, I wouldn't trust Apple with a barge pole, let alone the money from my wallet.
>Apple has faced multiple fines for deliberately slowing down older iPhones without informing users, including a €25 million fine in France and a $41 million fine for deceptive marketing practices. The company admitted to slowing down devices to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to aging batteries, but critics argued it was misleading.
These cases are much less convincing than they may seem if you just take a moment to read about them. iDevices would throttle the cpu to make the battery last longer as it's capacity falls, this kind of throttling is not uncommon and not malicious.
This wasn't misleading, and isn't something that warrants any genuine criticism.
In my experience, the only 2 mobile phone companies whose phones drain battery too fast are Apple and Samsung. Apple does this deliberately for older phones, whereas Samsung has this problem even for new phones.
You will not find this quick battery drain problem in Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, etc. Their phones last several years even with ageing batteries. An 10+ years old Oppo phone I have, still holds almost full charge at idle, throughout the day.
As batteries get older, their capacity to hold charge reduces, but if a phone battery is draining too fast even in idle mode, it is likely due to software, not hardware. And if it is due to software, then the manufacturer company is to blame.
I don't think you can find any evidence of a Apple actually deliberately doing things to make batteries drain faster on older models.
That would either require hurting the battery life on all models or require distinguishable behaviours that only occur on specific models and would be relatively simple to prove through reverse engineering.
Apple has been fined for the throttling, but hasn't ever been credibly accused of actually deliberately taking steps to reduce battery life on older devices.
What? Upgrade it yourself! Swapping the RAM in a mini 2012 doesn't even require tools. Both SoDIMMs are right under the bottom cover.
The SSD is a bit more fiddly, but can also be done at home. Check iFixit.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Late+2012+Hard+Drive+R...
That iFixit guide to upgrade the Max Mini is daunting for newbies.
But you've inspired me to gather courage and do the DIY upgrade myself next month during the holidays. No use having a working PC lying unused, merely because it is very sluggish due to old hardware. Wish me luck (for the upgrade), I think I'll need it.
You’re just limiting yourself for no reason. It’s not Apples fault that you are sitting in front of an un-upgraded computer that is tool-less (for one of your tasks, at least) and has step by step instructions meant for beginners.
If Apple wasn't forced by the EU, they would try to preserve their walled garden as much as possible. iMessage is the prime example of this.
Can another company federate with WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger?
Yes, because the EU mandated them to. Just no one seems to want to federate.
And you are perfectly capable of interacting with iMessage users now through SMS/MMS/RCS
Their RCS implementation is so incredibly broken, and I can tell as an Android user.
It seems like every other message gets downgraded to SMS.
That's because SMS is a horribly broken, hacky standard, and RCS has to inherit and deal with all the horrifying edge-cases of SMS, MMS, and legacy cruft going back prior to the turn of the millenium.
Then it has to accomodate every other intersted party, many of which hate each other. Apple has always been a bit of an odd duck ("Think Different" has been internalized for some time), but Verizon actively hates OTT messaging as they can't charge for it. Samsung would rather run their own RCS implementation to create and advertise "Samsung RCS", and Google can't push too hard without getting EU attention for antitrust (again).
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for years for multiple reasons, none of which are easy.
The specific issue I'm talking about is how Apple for some reason ties the presence of RCS persistently to a contact that requires the user to manually go in and adjust, otherwise the conversation switches back and forth between SMS and RCS as each participant texts back and forth.
This is a problem no other vendors have, and is solely caused by Apple.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-iphone-rcs-messagin...
Yes, except that SMS/MMS sucks major ass, and RCS is really, really bad too. Not as awful as SMS, but close, and missing various barebones features.
That's not Apple's fault per se, but of course, they contribute to it. They should open up the iMessage protocol.
So what you are saying is that for Apple to create a better experience, they have to add to the industry standard - the same as AirPods.
Yes, that would be mutually beneficial both for Apple customers and people who are not Apple customers.
Why is that on Apple instead of the hundreds of other manufacturers and Google? If Google wants a better ecosystem, it’s on them since according to them Android was suppose to be the “definition of open”.
Because while Android is "open", Google has no carrot (Verizon can't charge for OTT messaging and has no major incentive to push it), and no stick (pushing too hard will draw regulators' attention again)
RCS has been stuck in limbo-hell for several years, and I expect it to stay that way (to your point, I expect it to stay that way even if Apple chips in)
Google has a big stick - Google Play Services. They use it all of the time to get manufacturers to do what they want.
both scenarios speak to either an incredible impatience, or deliberate incompatibility to tie people to their ecosystem.
In general, rigidity of stack is a malfeasance. Over protecting the user brings fragility, un-adaptability, that curses the world. Android certainly is a rigid narrow protective stack that refuses to accommodate, again and again. Different genre, but decades latter and it still won't work on many ipv6 networks because for no clearly stated reason it won't support DHCPv6: Android is full of these weirdly unstated "principled" anti-compatibilities, and I can't excuse blaming the devices or networks for being what they are: it's the unbending rigid OS that offends me.
I do rather hope perhaps perhaps perhaps the EU & DMA or other may perhaps bend Apple off their rotten course of making non-standard bespoke systems. It seems like very recently the EU is getting ready to cave & abandon all their demands for trying to use standards, that their fear of the US is about to make them fold on insisting upon better. Demanding Apple stop doing everything in bespoke incompatible ways is something that should have happened a long time ago, imo, and it's so horrifying to see one of the only stands in my lifetime against the propeietarization & domination of systems by a bespoke corporate lord abandoned.
There's some rays of hope here & there. Seemoo Lab has a ton of amazing reverse engineering efforts, figuring out how many many many undocumented locked down Apple systems & protocols work & trying to give control back. This is the highest virtue, the best hacker nature. Here's Open Wireless Link, but they have so many other amazing projects they've similarly figured out out to pry open. Amazing best human spirit. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl
is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
I doubt it’s for any reason at all. The obvious explanation is that they just developed and tested these extra firmware features against Apple devices because that was the product decision. Since nobody was tasked with targeting Android they might not have even noticed that it wasn’t perfectly spec-compliant if those states were never encountered, nor expected to be encountered.
No there isn’t. I’ve said this a million times before, but usually just downvoted: this is about reducing support costs, not increasing revenue from lock-in. This is not a theory, I’ve sat in meetings at Cupertino and been told first hand.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
That's tautological. Everything that is not supported is so because supporting it has a cost. The question is what is the cost? It seems quite obvious that the marginal revenue from airpods would be overshadowed by the revenue of getting a user in the ecosystem.
Having to test the AirPods with more standards compliant devices, having to waste time to tell customers to fuck off if their phone/laptop/toaster is not standards compliant, having to waste engineering time to investigate non compliant aliexpress phones/laptops/toasters, wasting time to implement additional functionality for Apple customers because it has to go into the spec first
Yes, all that is a part of the cost equation, which points to the same thing, namely, that $200-$300 widgets are not worth selling to the general public; they would rather sell them to a customer who will spend a lot more in the ecosystem. Same as razors and blades or consoles and games.
Customer support costs are higher at Apple than its competitors, because they provide a better support experience. This is not a tautology, it’s one of their core value propositions
They couldn't just write (and make people aware at point of sale, ofc) 'no support for using devices with non-Apple Computers products' into Apple Care. They had to purposely break compatibility?
if (name == 'APPLE') will surely improve performance.
Specifications are there for a reason... Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
You can't even change noise cancel's mode.
It's just on and off, and doesn't let you choose between the different ones (transparency, conversation aware, etc)
> Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
It reminds me of the USB keyboard extender that came with old Macs. There’s a little notch in the socket so you can only use it with Apple keyboards. At the time I thought it was a petty way of preventing you from using it with any other device, but apparently the reason they didn’t want you to use it with other devices is because the cable didn’t comply with the USB spec.
Some pictures here: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/b1u08k/this_...
Yes, USB extenders are not spec-legal (because the device isn't built expecting to be extended).
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
Did you even bother about reading the comments on your own citation?
Yes, I did actually. I genuinely don’t know what you’re referring to?
>doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in.
No conspiracy needed, surely it would be unilateral? It seems exactly the sort of thing Apple Computers would do to protect their ecosystem.
Perhaps Apple correctly implemented the specification here
This is Microsoft's playbook from many years ago: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Apple is a promoter member of the Bluetooth standard organization for a while now, so it could submit that as an enhancement.
Assuming they even went off spec at all.
Performance reasons LOL. Apple fans love plausible deniability.
And haters love a conspiracy.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
As someone who's implemented custom Bluetooth protocols, it's actually quite easy to condemn an Apple manufacturer ID check to expose custom services.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Every time someone opens an argument with the classic appeal to authority “as someone who has…” you can almost certainly expect to have that person miss the point of the discussion entirely.
What a fantastic way to keep from addressing anything I said while still allowing you to act condescendingly.
You make a good point
Though I wonder why it works with Linux, which I assume doesn't have code for a special handshake specific to AirPods
Google works around a ton of out-of-spec hardware / driver quirks for Android's ExoPlayer media player stack. So it is more than reasonable to expect Google to add a workaround for this.
Any idea how much latency there is between the beginning of audio being played in an app, and it then coming out the headset?
I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing. As I'm dealing with short audio clips, this use case necessitates restarting the "audio playing" situation every few seconds.
Maybe the app developers could "play" quiet audio between these short clips. But barring such a development, I'd like to know if higher quality headphones might suffer from less latency in this regard.
> I use wired headphones to study with Anki (AnkiDroid) because I've found most (inexpensive) Bluetooth headphones require a second or two to begin playing.
1-2 seconds is an eon for audio latency so I guess something else is going on than anything BT related in the headphones. Unless you have particularly bad luck in what headphones you use.
FWIW, I use a variety of cheap and not so cheap BT headphones across multiple devices and apps including AnkiDroid and have not perceived any latency.
If switching to wired removes the latency then it does seem to indicate something in the BT stack of your device. I wonder if you experience the lag when using AnkiDroid + BT on another device.
Thank you. I actually have since switched devices, but have not yet tested on the new device. The old device was a flagship phone, the Note 10 Lite. That phone served me well for four years, I'll test on the S24 Ultra that just replaced it. Thank you.
This is your host idling the connection due to the silence. Just keep something playing (like a stream of almost-silence) on loop and you won't have this problem.
Yes, but I was asking if high quality or newer Bluetooth audio devices have a lower latency.
I will suggest to the app developers to add optional silence. Thank you.
Yes, there are newer Bluetooth headphones with significantly lower latencies, either through LE Bluetooth audio or through codecs like AptX LL.
Most reviewers are already utterly unable to measure "normal" latency. In the very ridiculous chance you'll find a reviewer measuring wake up latency (which has little to do with the codec used), I wouldn't even trust it.
Yes, wake up latency is going to be a crapshoot, but you can eliminate it by playing a silent file at the expense of battery life. Actual latency though there's nothing you can do about it, so it's more important imo.
That's probably some sort of gate on your headphones that silences audio (by killing power to the amplifier circuitry) if it's below a threshold loudness level, to prevent users from hearing a hissing sound the cheap circuitry produces that is otherwise masked by other louder sounds. When gate opens again, it takes 1-2 seconds for the amplifier to power up completely.
Thank you. I've noticed this with multiple headphones, but they have all been inexpensive models.
Still, it's kind of amazing that one person hacked around both Apple's walled garden and Android's jank to make this work at all
It's not really hard to reverse engineer AirPods. Just watch the bluetooth communication between a mac and the AirPods, turn specific features on/off, see how it reacts, then replicate exactly. I wanted to do it myself but saw something like this already exists (librepods, previously called "Airpods like normal (aln)").
Last 2 comments:
> Need fix please
> original engineers got laid off thats why
That is such a typical bug report to a large company. A user who spent a lot of time debugging and finding the root cause of an issue, and a few faceless peons at the large company spending a few minutes on it, realizing it’s not a priority, and abandoning it.
Ah, when "open source" means begging an advertisement company to bless your code changes...
It was a hack. An actual code change would be submitted via the gerrit and not buganizer.
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
Yeah except nobody is going to put the effort in to do that because they know it will be ignored.
I tried back in the day.
Not really. There wasn’t a true patch attempt submitted, as far as I can see. There was some helpful info about how commenting out a couple lines could work around the issue, but doing a real engineering evaluation to check spec compliance and make sure it’s all covered in the Bluetooth testing infrastructure is a much bigger task.
[flagged]
And not a small bug either. This large an interoperability issue and it takes a nerd not in the employ of Google to fix their shit? This is why Apple's vertical integration makes it one of richest companies in the world. Google's only up there because of their success in that one business of theirs.
Funny, I was under the impression that Apple's stuff is closed source, so no one outside their employ even could fix a similar issue?
Bearing in mind that Apple does Open Source some stuff: https://opensource.apple.com/projects
They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too:
* https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/
* https://opensource.apple.com/releases/
I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.
Apparently, android isn't fixing it either.
What does Apple being Apple have to do with Google not paying somebody to work on getting Airpods, which presumably should conform to some Bluetooth spec, in order to get Airpods to work on Android?
>>...due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation.
The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee.
We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.
I'm convinced it's impossible to implement the BT spec without MANY of these kinds of bugs popping up.
Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth. I'm sick of living in a reality where no one thinks to make something better. It has to be possible.
> Apple mercy-killed Adobe Flash, we should be asking they do the same to Bluetooth.
They won't, because it turns out Bluetooth is the best thing we have at "discover nearby devices". Guess how Apple TV/screen sharing detection, iPhone hotspot detection and configuration, AirDrop and a whole host of other features work without communicating via some cloud mothership? They are all using Bluetooth to do detection and negotiation to a high-bandwidth link!
Amongst widespread radio communication mechanisms, there are only NFC, Bluetooth and WiFi. NFC is sometimes used to provision wifi passwords, but it's short-range to the tune of a few cm tops. WiFi has discovery, but nothing in the protocol to make sure initial conversations cannot be eavesdropped, and low-power wifi stacks are hard to do, in contrast to Bluetooth with BTLE.
That's what I'm saying. Adobe ends BT support in all their devices and software stacks and switches to "Appletooth," which they promise to open up and then 5 years later actually do it.
Appletooth being a from-scratch all-new, cleanly-designed protocol that makes actual sense and is easy to implement by vendors without inherent security flaws.
I won't lie, it would be a horrifically painful transition. But it would be worth it. Apple should have some courage when it's actually called for (...not killing hardware ports, which no consumer was asking for).
I've never used iPhones and have stuck by Google Pixel. I still feel all of the above in my heart. Apple's the only one who can possibly fulfill my dream of Bluetooth's bitter end.
Apple killed flash and an alternative has not emerged decades later. Please don't give these pricks ideas.
Are HTML5 video, canvas and WebGL not replacements? What in particular do you feel has not been replaced?
Does HTLM5 and WebGL allow all the same security holes and waste as much energy as Flash? Hmmm? Sounds like it’s not a replacement then.
Adobe Animate (née Flash) still exists and exports HTML5-ready MP4s now. Which, as an actual user of Macromedia Flash and dabbler in Newgrounds uploads, is a much better situation. Flash the plugin sucked shit and everyone knew it, including Tom Fulp.
Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.
I’m amazed by the retconning of Flash into a great system.
I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.
It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.
Yeah I wonder if these people ever actually used Flash YouTube on Android. It was awful.
Adobe said it was only because of mean old Apple that they couldn’t get it to run on the original iPhone. When it finally came to Android around 2010, it barely ran on a 1Ghz Android phone with 1GB of RAM.
Mind you that the first iPhone cake with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz processor.
An iPhone with the theoretical specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Also see the first “iPad Killer” the Motorola Xoom’s marquee feature was suppose to be that it could run Flash. But Adobe was late releasing the Xoom in the unenviable problem of that you couldn’t view its home page on the device.
Flash the authoring suite was great
Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
Nah, Flash was awful. Terrible performance on low end devices. Unforgivably terrible for web video. Nightmare on Linux. Nightmare in enterprise environments.
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).
This take doesn’t make sense unless you’re comparing Flash to current technology, rather than the tech of its time. It’s like saying CD players were awful: sure they’re awful NOW, but they had a time and a place when they were the coolest thing around.
Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).
Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.
It’s one of the topics I feel I’m too biased since I spend 10 years as a flash developer. The requests for widgets and or small applications we got where simply impossible to write in a frontend only fashion at the time. And a lot of my peers moved on to work on HTML5 which was pushed hard as the successor at the time. A lot felt like a step back. I moved to native iOS and worked on games in cocoa 2D. I remember that I thought more than once: “This was already solved in flash”. But I think in the end it’s a good thing that we don’t have or need the flash player anymore. I wish only we could have gotten a flash to wasm/webgl compiler or flash to js transpiler. ActionScript 3 was great and leagues ahead of JavaScript at the time.
Yup, this was my career path as well. I worked professionally as a Flash developer for many years but gradually that became more of an iOS developer role and I made games using Cocos2D etc.
No, I’m talking about at the time. CD players were great at the time, so I don’t really see your analogy. Maybe the closest thing would be those brittle CD jewel cases, those always sucked!
The cardboard sleeves that replaced jewel boxes were far worse. At least jewel boxes would line up straight on a shelf.
I had a chance to read the Adobe FlashLite Player source code once. Holy shit.
Yeah it was superb for the layman.
If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow
As someone who did a bunch of work on Ruffle a while back, "mercy kill" is almost the correct word. There's about a decade it spent rotting before the actual kill, and Apple's not the one who fired the final shot. I've heard stories from both the Apple and Adobe side on this, but basically both companies wanted Flash on iOS and neither of them were capable of actually shipping a good version of it.
Apple begged Adobe to ship a working Flash mobile build at least four times and each time they rejected it for all sorts of various UX or performance issues. At one point Apple asked for and was delivered Flash Player source code, which they reportedly couldn't get to compile. Adobe tried to brand Flash as an open standard, and then went over Apple's head by just shipping an AIR runtime that could be packaged into an IPA and submitted to Apple. Jobs then wrote the infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter, which was really there to justify going scorched-earth and banning all third-party development tools. This only lasted for about three months before the Obama DOJ threatened to sue[0].
Also, Steve Jobs was probably pissed off that he couldn't get the CEO of Adobe on speed-dial. At that point in time everyone involved with shipping iPhone software was in his contacts and in regular contact with him. Google logo looks weird on the phone screen? Have Jobs call Page and get it fixed in 10 minutes.
As it stood after that moment, Flash was a viable development platform for iPhone apps and remained so for many years. This is entirely separate from its use in the browser. Practically speaking, you have probably played plenty of Flash games on iOS without even knowing it, because all the hard work of building touch-friendly UX and a performant UI was shunted over to the developers of individual games rather than trying to make, say, the core Flash rendering model GPU capable[1].
Adobe then shipped Flash Player for Android to huge fanfare, and it sucked just as hard as it did on Apple's dev iPhones and was unceremoniously canned a year later.
At this point it was obvious Flash Player needed a rewrite, even within Adobe, so they announced "FP Next" along with an AS4 language for new movies to run in. Except the Adobe execs were angry about the cost so they tried to shake down their customers for the funds. They wanted any cross-compiled 3D engine code to have to pay a revshare to Adobe. Everyone jumped ship to Unity, so Adobe canned the revshare requirement... and FP Next/AS4, the thing that was supposed to modernize Flash's aging codebase.
And then right after Adobe starts disinvesting from Flash, a bunch of CVEs land and all the browser vendors pushed hard to actually, once and for all, excise plugins from the browser. That was the actual mercy kill, but it was preceded by almost a decade in which all the people who knew how Flash actually worked didn't have the budget to fix it, and all the people who wanted it fixed didn't have the expertise to do it.
[0] For the record, Obama was the guy who saw Zuckerberg illegally buying Instagram to keep people from moving off of Facebook and said "sure thing, wave it through".
[1] There's an AS3 project called Starling that gives you hardware rendering by pre-rendering a bunch of assets in advance into bitmaps, which kind of betrays the whole point of Flash. But I also can't imagine Adobe doing it any other way as the Flash renderer was both highly optimized and bespoke.
Thanks for the writeup. Dear God, Adobe's leadership appears to have been completely bonkers...
I wonder why they didn't just go and open-source the entire damn thing, all its commercial value has been lost anyway.
Mercy.
Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.
> Flash was great.
It had a great number of CVEs, you mean?
_modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
By stitching together an inconsistent hodgepodge of sometimes overlapping languages, technologies and APIs. On the user-side, I'm glad I don't need a proprietary player for such things any longer, but I sure hate doing anything remotely touching Web, in particular for the kind of highly interactive experiences Flash was good at.
In truth, the Web has eclipsed Flash, the player, but not the product.
You’re entitled to your opinion, as is everyone else and my opinion is that flash was dogshit and I’m glad it had a bullet put in it.
What realllly irks me is that Apple did not even make the new AirPods Pro 3 backwards compatible with iOS 18. Features that are available with the AirPods Pro 2 on iOS 18 were not available with the APP3. SAME iOS device, SAME H2 chip, but I was forced to upgrade to (the dumptser fire of a release) iOS 26 to maintain feature parity with the APP2 in an all Apple ecosystem.
So f*ing steamed. Still. And Apple support had no clue and kept telling me it should all 'Just Work'.
Mark Zuckerberg explicitly called out the airpod pairing being closed as unfair in a semi recent interview, maybe he can throw some dollars that way and get it all working nicely in some meta products.
That's backwards.
It's not AirPods being closed that's unfair. Apple should be able to sell first party tech that only works with their own products.
What's unfair is Apple locking everyone else out. Not allowing or documenting for third parties to use the same APIs to enable something like automatic device switching in third party bluetooth headphones is the unfair part.
Same goes for the watch. That the Apple Watch only works with iPhone isn't the problem. The problem is no other third party is able to make a smartwatch that competes on an level playing field with the Apple Watch on Apple Devices, because Apple locks them out.
lock-out is the unfair problem.
"only works with their own products" == "lock-out"
Or am I missing something that distinguishes between these two in your view?
Only works with their own products is lock-in.
Lock-out is Apple preventing third parties from making accessories that can match the first party ones in feature parity and seamlessness.
Apple Watch only working with iPhones=lock-in
No third party watch being allowed to use the same APIs the Apple Watch does or not being allowed to access iMessage, Apple Pay, etc = lock-out.
By locking their products "in", they're also locking third parties "out". How on earth would they be able to "lock-in" the Apple Watch to the iPhone while at the same time NOT "locking-out" third parties?
It's the same thing.
I have a apartement i rent out for vacation
If i offer to bring you fresh breakfast in the morning but not offer the service to other apartments down the street -> „lock in“
If i do not allow you to get your breakfast (of equal quality)elsewhere -> „lock out“
I think they're suggesting that lock in implies apple didn't write the code to help support 3rd parties. Lock out implies they actively wrote code to prevent 3rd parties.
With other companies there may be a difference. But with Apple, for all intents and purposes, it's the same thing. Because they are hostile to third-party integration using undocumented API's or interfaces.
I'm not the person you're asking to but this is my reasoning:
1. If I'm building a gadget for my line of products, I want to be able to test it only with my products. I don't want to spend money to make it work with anybody's else products. There are standards but there are bugs and non compliant products from known and unknown parties, their problems.
2. However I might also want to be able to build gadgets for somebody's else products, so I appreciate if those companies stick to standards and don't go out of their ways to make their products incompatible with gadgets of third parties. BTW, this reminds me about cartridges for inkjet printers.
So I think that it would be fair for Apple to say, "these earpieces are tested to work only on these products of mine: ...; if they happen to work on something else: congratulations! you got lucky." It won't be fair if they make their products incompatible with every other earpieces and at the same time claim that they are compliant to a standard.
But fairness and business are often at odds.
It's not up to a third party to invest into opening up Apple's purposely locked-down ecosystem.
…unless someone has sufficient time and/or money to spend on it, and wants to do so as a point of principle.
If I had large amounts of spare money, I’d love to seed small endeavours that (according to my personal world view) made the world incrementally better.
As has been noted before, what’s the point of having ‘FU money’ if you don’t use it to say ‘FU’ now and again?
Yeah, but saying "maybe super rich people will do random illogical things" isn't really a great argument. For all we know, Mark Zuckerberg wants to spend his "fuck you" money locking the ecosystem down even more, as a "fuck you" to consumers.
Cool project, not cool that it needs to exist. Apple isn’t only content to leech off OSS software, they have to force the existence of more of it to workaround what they closed off.
To be clear, you can use AirPods with an Android device for audio.
It’s the extra convenience features integrated into iOS and macOS to change certain settings that have been reverse engineered here. And you can’t actually even use them without rooting your phone and applying a patch to Android’s Bluetooth stack.
A device sold not in small part due to its noise cancelling ability, yet having no way to turn it on/off when connected to Android is not an extra convenience feature.
You can turn it on and off with long presses on the airpod stalk itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944454
I meant to add it here
It’s exactly the same to try to use pixel buds on an Apple phone too. I don’t blame Apple or Google so much as the ridiculous pissing matches of a society that refuses to find ways to cooperate efficiently. So much energy is wasted in the name of vendor lock-in and related. Would it take more energy for Google and Apple to share in expanding into the Bluetooth capabilities in a shared way? Sure for their developers, in the short run. In less than a year the society wide savings far outweighs that. Apple people might cross pollinate and buy pixel buds. Android people will get airpods. Both companies could make even more money and save us all sanity. But we are organized for short term gains. Gradient descent without knowing or using the topology of the global complex. This isn’t Apple or Google’s job to fix, not even the government. it’s an issue at the social fabric level to have deep conscientiousness… so none of this is ever gonna change in our lives.
> It’s exactly the same to try to use pixel buds on an Apple phone too.
Is it? You have to link me to the iOS patches that iPhone users have written to enable Pixel Buds on iOS.
Or maybe it's not exactly the same.
I wonder which APIs aren't accessible on the iPhone so the same features can't be implemented on a iOS pixel buds app.
Whataboutism and cynicism about the status quo notwithstanding, I do agree BT protocol and adherence to it could be improved though.
Apple's tight grip on their ecosystem ends up generating more open source out of sheer necessity... it's kind of ironic
Seeing how much effort this takes makes me feel vindicated for never buying in to the wireless-earbud trend at all. I love love love having one of the few modern Androids with a real TRRS jack (REDMAGIC 9S Pro) and wired earbuds (Etymōtic ER4XR), that I never need to charge, that can't get lost, and that can't spy on me: https://i.imgur.com/4yymgYO.jpeg
What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world. Ear Detection? My phone does the same thing with my default music app when it detects the jack plugged back in. Multiple devices (up to two)? lol. Head Gestures? How many people even answer the phone at all now after years of relentless spam? Conversational Awareness? I got a $3 clip to attach the wire to my shirt collar, and if I talk to someone or someone talks to me I yank one or both buds out and let them dangle freely with no worry of getting lost or stolen: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BL44TW4
I would be totally down to adopt a new paradigm if it was actually better in any way I cared about, but it's just not and never was. People seem to like 'em a lot, though, so I'm still glad to see these supported on non-Apple gear :)
> What a silly feature list the AirPods have, too. Transparency? I use earbuds to avoid having to hear the outside world.
What a silly thing to dismiss a product over. The transparency levels are actually a great feature. You can go from noise cancelling to being able to have a perfect conversation with someone or listen for the kids with a quick squeeze of the earbud. I use it all the time.
Likewise your comment that it’s superior to buy a separate clip and attach the wire to yourself so people can yank them out is just asinine. Or is this parody? It’s hard to tell.
This whole comment feels like someone trying to convince themselves that the thing they didn’t buy is actually terrible and bad, so they can pat themself on the back for not buying it.
"This one brand is bad, therefore I am right in dismissing the whole category of product."
Imagine having to charge your earbuds lol
>Seeing how much effort this takes
It takes effort even for the fanboys, but they are not going to tell you the hoops they jump through even in the Apple Soma Bubble (delete delete "Ecosystem"). You are expected to have the latest semi-broken iOS to even call your latest gen airpods airpods instead of generic bt audio devices lol. Let alone trying to make anything Apple work in Android.
I see the reason to liberate this corporate BT bullshit as a matter of principle, but I don't see the point of Apple fanboys today. In the 90s Apple was light years ahead of wintel, but today they are worse and more expensive than high end brands (etymotic for example) who don't engage in the silly marketing blending of brand and personal self worth the fanboys seem to ingest as if their life depends on it. They strike me as impoverished third worlders who think their internet cred will go up by buying Apple gear. Apple used to really mean "It Just Works", but not anymore by any stretch. On the other hand, the peace of mind of solving a problem for good and forgetting about it, like -radical idea- headphone jacks (removed because "courage"), using a stable environment on a computer you own with an environment you can recreate instead of the Apple merry-go-round, using your own infrastructure and ideas instead of hoping the Apple "Magic" will work when you really need to restore a backup. And when the Apple Machine(TM) eats your superior Apple creations, you simply were holding it wrong, man! Makes me wonder what the rest of the engineering world is thinking... for example, when are HiFi manufacturers going to ditch slimy, unseemly, dusty speaker cables for superior bluetooth sound quality? Why o why are Canon/Sony/Leica/etc still going with environmentally unfriendly, inefficient, heavy and dumb 35 mm image sensors? Don't they know about the miraculous-camera-assembly in iPhones? All 50 MP crammed not in 35 mm but in half the size, now that's sweet!
The idiocies keep coming, like "nano-textured" glass in Apple monitors that simply rehash the professional displays that for years have had accurate color reproduction, superior brightness, and -god forbid- matte screens. I think I must have a long-lost engineering prototype of a monitor with a superior, believed lost forever "nano-textured" glass. It's called matte screen, and it came in the superior display ratio called 16:10 once used by the dinosaurs instead of the retarded craze of everything you can dream of as long as it's 16:9 lol.
Apple fanboys: your identity brand has long since eroded, but by all means keep those credit cards warm, you need to finance the next Tim Cook yatch :)
Uhhhh, Apple donates a ton of code to OSS
When the license legally compels them to, and sometimes not even then.
Unsurprisingly, you cannot assign a single intent to 166k+ people.
Just like Microsoft there are parts of the company who are hostile to open source, and there parts of the company whose success is attributable to open source.
True, but you can compare them to, say, Google, which maintains thriving OSS projects like Chromium and AOSP and generally does a way better job at publishing code and research.
I wouldn’t mention as positive example. I wouldn’t even mention them as example.
Apple cooperates within WebKit well with WebKitGtk. They supported LLVM when it is in their interest.
Chrome is used as proprietary web-engine to vendor lock-in the web. While often used by others, I’m not aware of a broad cooperation. Android is a shadow of Linux, merely using the Linux-Kernel, not GNU. Plus a lot of closed-source code (PlayServices, App Signatures, Google Cloud, Google Apps).
Googles open-source projects seem often exclusive Google only projects? Google works together with others! But especially Chrome and AOSP are…causing worries.
AOSP is the foundation of GrapheneOS, LineageOS and dozens of other patently non-Google systems. Chromium is the foundation for Edge, Brave, Opera, and every single AI browser being churned out by the dozen. Many of the Chromium forks are specifically designed to block Google ads.
There's a reason most of these projects picked AOSP over iOS, or even Chromium over WebKit. Google just engages with the community better than Apple. It's silly to pretend like they're on the same level.
You can absolutely assign intent to a company, it's not an arbitrary grouping of 166k people.
An incomplete list here but most aren’t a license that compels them to contribute anything.
https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
I think it's fair to say Apple's cross platform work is a couple of Android and PC apps, the Mac boot loader, and Swift. Even on this page, Apple seems more like a user of the community projects than a contributor and the Apple projects seem to be for internal use or for Apple platforms. Kind of misses the point in being cross platform the way librepod is aiming to be.
That’s not what this particular thread is about, you’re referencing the parent topic but not the current thread.
This is about whether they contribute to open source or not.
Contributing to open source isn't a substitute for having cross platform products, features and support.
Again, I repeat, not what this thread is about.
Look up Swift
You mean the language that approximately nobody uses outside XCode, which requires you to register an Apple developer account to function? The same language that only switched to an OSS license after they realized nobody wanted to contribute to a proprietary language?
Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.
Swift went open source the day it was released. I don’t think Apple needs outside contributors. I think it has enough resources that it would be okay
Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.
"[Swift] was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015"
Darwin is also a bad example:
"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"
"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."
What does OpenDarwin or PureDarwin, independent projects, have to do with the fact that Darwin, Apple’s OS kernel, is open source?
Because they show that Darwin may be technically open source, but Apple are horrible stewards of it. It's impossible to actually build a usable operating system from it, which is probably their intent.
Just because the license doesn't require it doesn't mean they aren't a leech.
They are a leech exactly because they didn't release stuff when given the option. If you're forced to release stuff, that doesn't tell me anything about whether you're a leech or not. Only what you do of your own volition does.
[flagged]
Don't the Beats earbuds have literally the exact the same chipsets and speaker drivers as airpods, but play way nicer with Androids?
I know that used to be the case a few years ago at least, but I'm not sure if it's still true.
Excellent project, don't forget to upvote the Android bluetooth bug to give a signal: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238?pli=1
Given that it's already the most upvoted open Android framework bug, and the Google employee it's assigned to hasn't touched it in almost a year, it seems unlikely that more upvotes will make any difference whatsoever.
Where's the meme of the guy who gets hired on to a tech company, fixes one bug that always annoyed them, then quits immediately
Geohot at Twitter
A no-nobody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz
In such cases it's always better to just open a new identical bug and hope it gets assigned to someone more interested/competent, and no one notices it's a dupe before that.
I agree, but chance favors the tickets that someone internally champions, and there are plenty of Googlers lurking here.
Another +1 comment under it is far more likely to make more people mute the issue if anything. Spamming "google pls fix" just adds to the noise at this point.
Super cool. Also, this is an example of why having an open OS is awesome.
Been using it with my airpods 3 anc on a pixel with custom rom (what a curious setup thinking about it). And it's good enough but kinda annoying the airpods don't seem to save my configs and connection isn't really stable. Not complaining since they're not even supposed to be supported tho, thanks for the free stuff ! I wonder if I'd be able to contribute better support with my very limited knowledge of bluetooth analysis...
hey, do you have the 'act as apple device' hook enabled perhaps? that sometimes causes connections to drop. other than that, i believe i refactored the background service to store metadata about the airpods and support various model types recently which can make the app a bit unstable, hence no new release yet- the build is available to download from Actions. if you're facing unstability on the latest (pre)release, v0.2.0-alpha open a issue, i will have a look whenever i get the time.
about the configs not being saved- do you mean the conversational awareness, adaptive volume etc.? those should be saved, and sent from airpods every time you connect. so if you change the config from any other device, and connect to your phone then the app should show the new config.
you can contirbute by supporting the development, of course! :)
A Show HN: thread submitted by the dev earlier in the year, without traction here, but some background details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42610644
Tunable transparency mode sounds great, and I wish Apple would do something like this as first-party support.
As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.
Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.
I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.
apple doesn't allow much customization, only the 9 presets under accessibility>hearing>headphone accomodation. this eq then also applies to the audio played and transparency settings both. maybe one of those nine presets suits your needs?
This is awesome on Linux. I've wanted to see my battery status forever, and the ability to pause when you remove an AirPod is really nice too.
This type of project makes me want to click the sponsor repo button on github. Amazing work!
It's wild how many features Apple locks down purely via software, even though you paid a premium for the hardware
This excellent.. there needs to be a macos version as well. Using Mavericks I was unable to adjust any settings on my airpods pro 2
I can’t get my Airpods Pro 2 to connect to Mavericks at all for any length of time, this has been driving me nuts for years! They’ll connect and play audio for a few seconds, then cut out, and I’ll have to re-pair to get any audio again.
Did you have to do anything special?
Check out AirBuddy for something that provides similar control in macOS. Closed source and costs money though. It doesn't need to rely on the reverse engineered protocol, and instead just calls out to macOS APIs to manipulate the Airpods. (I presume)
Not going to help on Mavericks, which doesn’t have those APIs.
i don't think macos allows l2cap connections (the protocol that airpods use), at least pybluez doesn't support that on macos which would've made making a simple script a lot simpler.
Does this not do what you want? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/iobluetooth/ioblue...
Title has a typo, should be “liberated”.
Edit: I noticed that the article's page title is also misspelled this way.
I assume it's intentional, playing on "libre" (as in libre software, not just gratis software)
As just the biggest problem with that idea, the typo doesn't exist on the page. It's in the HN title, and the page's HTML <title> tag.
It does exist on the page. It's in the description of the repository below the repository name.
Look again.
You're right that the text you're thinking of used to be in that space, if you mean the "About" blurb.
But you're not right about the page contents. The "About" is github metadata, just like the partial commit message "android: multidevice capabilites and accessiblit..." that you can also find. And just like that message, it was full of typos because it's not public-facing.
But there is an actual page talking about the project, which is what we're all commenting on here, and which never contained the typo.
yup it did- fixed it now. thanks!
Funny, I once called out a typo and got ridiculed and downvoted into oblivion. Seems it goes against HN terms of service or something...
Aren't airpods just bluetooth headphones?
For just listening to music, yeah. They’ve got other features that aren’t supported elsewhere, though.
specifically, configuring noise cancelation or transparency mode, as well as multiple different profiles for microphone usage. plus buttons on the airpods themselves.
Still baffles me why the first gen airpod "button" wasn't the winner, but unfortunately Steve's no longer with us.
Apple doesn’t make anything that’s “just <standard protocol>”.
Something needs to make it very expensive and feel exclusive… Yes, you can have AirPods with noise cancellation, but you need a 1k€ iPhone to go with that.
Incorrect.
AirPods noise cancellation can be controlled by holding the AirPod stalk.
And that’s not an excuse or a workaround: That’s how I always do it. I’ve never bothered doing it through software on my iDevices, because that’s much more cumbersome.
I think the parent was being sarcastic, because while you can trigger some function on the AirPods themselves, a large list of features are unavailable, not documented and purposefully concealed (as the main post describes in detail). AirPods don't even report their battery life to third party devices (as normal Bluetooth accessories can)
The ANC doesn't work on non iOS or macOS/iPadOS devices, though. Holding the stalk won't work
Yes it does. I have Airpod 4 ANC connected to a Samsung Galaxy S24 as we speak and I cycle between ANC and Transparency mode frequently by squeezing the stalk.
This thread is full of weird misinformation.
This is misinformation. I change anc modes using the air pod while connected to my non root android device. The anc works identically when connected to an Apple device
You needed to have configured it on Mac/iOS though.
How much effort would it take to get this working on Windows?
see MagicPods. although, it's paid, and requires windows to be in test mode to install a driver for L2CAP support. microsoft has decided to not allow l2c for userspace applications.
You might be able to get it working via WSL
I've wanted to try AirPods for my dad as hearing aids, but haven't done so because he would have to have the iPhone on hand. He's too old and blind to operate an iPhone. Can anyone here tell me how to take this awesome repo and make a hearing aid possibility for him with a simpler interface?
setting up hearing aids is a one time thing. then, the main adjustment is the amplification, which can be controlled by swiping on the stem. there is no need for an iphone for using it as hearing aids.
hmmm... so, I have been tempted to investigate Airpods for heading aid use, as the "medical" ones I have now are complete garbage for doing anything on my phone - they regularly forget their bluetooth sync status, they do not have enough volume to watch media on the phone - and when it comes to music, they are laughably horrible.
But... in my country, Apple Airpods are not certified as "hearing aids", so that functionality is blocked... Perhaps with this, I will have an Android phone in my future...
This is needed even if you are IN the Apple ecosystem. I don't want to upgrade my phone to the latest half-baked iOS version, so Apple purposefully degrades the functionality of my new AirPods 3. Siri won't switch noise cancellation modes, I can't see the battery status, they get relegated to the "generic bluetooth device" section, and even the battery widget will display three identical headphone icons for headphones and the case.
How do I know this is done purposefully and not just because AirPods 3 are so new and different from AirPods 2? Well, macOS has been neglected of late, and Apple didn't find the time to break things there, so Airpods 3 work with macOS just as well as Airpods 2 did — switching modes, battery status display, etc.
It's very disappointing, and not a great customer experience.
I have been slowly moving away from Apple devices and the 15 Pro will likely be my last iPhone.
The “it just works” argument keeps falling apart.
I’ve already moved over to Linux for my laptop and desktop experience. I only use my iPad to remote into my desktop at this point and use it as my travel laptop. Turns out I don’t really need an iPad.
Super impressive. Looks like the author also reimplemented Apple’s new Liquid Glads UI in Jetpack Compose?
I don’t know what the other UI options are, but that seems like a step backwards.
I have been using AirPods with Android phones for several years now.
I’m trying to connect my airports pro 2 to my old, old 2011 iPod. It’s not going very well.
While I haven’t managed to find anything close to an answer using google, chatgpt is quite confident it’s because of Bluetooth versions.
Surely Bluetooth 5 is backwards compatible, but then again if the AirPods thinks it’s connected to an iOS device it seems reasonable that it will start using all the proprietary iOS features and then communication breaks down.
So to me, liberation of airpods is an on-device issue.
It seems to let you access head tracking data, so now I'm really curious if it would be accurate enough to use with games (eg, microsoft flight sim/arma 3/euro truck simulator 2 head tracking). There is probably a lot of other interesting use cases for it too, but I'm stuck with windows for now so :(
There was a show hn a couple months ago that demonstrated that it could be used for a game. It worked better than I expected. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45362365
the head gestures is something i couldn't quite figure out, so the gesture logic is completely AI generated. i don't know how to get the actual values from the sensors. but there sure is a use in gaming.
Tangent, sound does take knowledge obv to setup to sound good.
I remember flashing the Pine64 Pine Buds and man I could not get them to sound right aside from the original settings. They were not great to begin with but yeah.
The UI looks great
Apart from being absolutely unusable on any actually used Android phone, very weird that the author didnt bother to have any write up of how they actually did this, not really sure if its a rip off of the CAPods repo, will have to confirm that later
Tim Apple will not be happy about this.
You’re right. People outside of the Apple ecosystem might by high margin AirPods!!!
Why would they? Apple will simply plug the hole in the next version.
Because Apple likes money. If you want to buy an AirPod, Apple is not going to stop you.
A lot of Apple products are designed to best work with other Apple products, that's part of their selling point. Would it not be easier to just buy non Apple headphones if you are not in the Apple eco system?
No, they’re designed to work worse with non-Apple products to keep people in the Apple ecosystem. Sure, if you’re not already in the ecosystem it does make sense to buy other products. But if you already own AirPods then you’re reluctant to switch to Android or Linux/Windows, because you either have a degraded experience or have to shell out for new stuff.
It’s convenient only as long you stick to their closed ecosystem. Requiring a device to identify as an Apple device to expose all features is an anti-feature. The devices should expose all features regardless, and leave it to the device/platform vendor to implement the config software.
If it’s vertical integration producing results, that’s all right.
If it’s consciously kneecapping the device for all manufacturers except yours, it’s not a practice beneficial to anyone but monopolies, so consumer laws should prevent it.
This repo seems to prove the case of AirPods is closer to the latter.
“Work best” is giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here. The point of standards like Bluetooth is to avoid vendor lock-in and promote interoperability. If Apple chooses to leverage the spec to produce a product that has degraded functionality when used with other vendors, that goes against the spirit of the spec and makes it worthless.
You might argue, well why did Apple choose to use Bluetooth at all if they’re not going to participate in the interoperability motive? Because initially (think early iPhones) Apple did not design wireless communication modules and benefits from buying COTS from existing vendors.
So would it be easier to just participate in vendor lock-in? Let me ask you, do you enjoy being able to fill up a car at any gas station, or charge your car at any 120V outlet? Standards usually benefit everyone.
Yet if someone likes the sound quality, fit, or ANC of AirPods (which are genuinely good), why should they lose out on functionality just because they're not using an iPhone?
I'm all for everything being compatible with everything, but why should apple invest resources in testing/debugging android compatibility for something that they make?
There is a vast difference between testing and debugging and not intentionally making your product worse when on a standard BT connection which is basically what Apple is doing.
There is zero business sense in making it work as good on non Apple phones. There are plenty of other headphones to choose from that work well with android etc.
I guess that’s fair. But it’s also possible that you already own an iPhone + AirPods, and you wanna buy a new non-Apple phone
I decided to not buy another iPhone when I changed phone because I dislike how Apple both overprices the phone in Europe yet refuse to ship features and keep lying through their teeth about the impact of regulation. I would still like to keep using my AirPods which work fine and I have already paid.
Hi. I'm not here to troll. This is an amazing project. Why did they select AGPL license over just plain ol' GPL? It seems hard to imagine where the "A" is useful for this software.
Lots of folks see the network provisions of AGPL as kind of like the anti-tivoization clause in GPLv3. I.e. patching flaws / loopholes found in GPLv2. In that sense, AGPLv3 is "the most GPL" that can be GPL'd and so it is attractive to folks who lean in that licensing direction. Never know how code will be put to use in the future.
The developer here- I didn't plan to release an app for android, or even linux. The android app just started out as a personal project. My plan was to make a service for linux that can talk to various headphones, and any UI can talk to the service. And this was supposed to be under AGPL. But, as I graudally reverse-engineered most of the protocol from the bluetooth stack on macOS, I decided to release the app for Android and make one for linux as well.
Going to change it to GPL, though. never paid attention to the license in use as I developed.
Thanks for the direct reply. I didn't consider the SaaS angle when I wrote my original post. As a result, your initial license choice makes sense. Also, if you are in control of copyright for all of the source code, then you can easily change the license. I am still blown away by how you did it. It must have been a lot of reverse engineering! Hats off -- keep up the good work.
Would be cool to decouple Apple Watches from iPhones, too.
This is awesome. I wish we had real EQ on the iOS. Ideally PEQ.
A Show HN: thread submitted by the dev earlier in the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42610644
How does this interact with Apple Find My?
Will it mean if my kid travels with their phone (Android) and their AirPods and me/my phone (Android), I won't get a message about being tracked anymore?
That would be nice.
Require rooted android? That makes it useless for 99% of us
“Do you want to sell AirPods?”
No. They want to sell more i-devices so this is just punishment for not fully participating.
AirPods are my favourite headphones by a mile. I’d love to get microphone mode working on Linux without the audio sounding terrible.
I’d also be curious if anyone can offer insight on why the range is so much better when paired with my iPhone than my computer.
Apple devices uses their own codec, which isn't even supported on macOS, that supports high definition two-way streaming
Where did the "libREated" in the title come from?
It comes from the GitHub repo description. There is a typo though but this is maybe intentional as the name of the repo is librepods
It was a typo in the GH repo description, fixed it.
likely a misspelling of "liberated"?
I came here to see what the deal was because I'm surprised this typo is still present a day later XD
Companies are doing some crazy stuff to block other devices. One of the worst things that I have seen is that on MacOS you cannot use the AirPods in a Microsoft Teams call.
I’ve used virtually every version of AirPods with Microsoft teams, including AirPod maxes. I use AirPods with teams calls every day.
Let’s definitely not pretend like Teams isn’t the crappiest app in the Milky Way. Any user issues can be squarely placed on Microsoft teams with confidence. Actual garbage app.
I’ve been using AirPods in macOS in Microsoft Teams call all the time.
Seconding the other user saying that I also use AirPods Pro (2nd gen) in Teams at least twice a day, on macOS, iOS, and Windows (and had used them on android before, as well). Absolutely no issue whatsoever, and everyone mentions I usually have by far the best audio out of anyone else in the call.
What would Apple even gain out of this? They don’t have a competitor to MS Teams, FaceTime is hardly targeting the same segment.
I use them on Teams on macOS (and Windows) every day and is the main reason I have them. What you say is simply not true.
Requires your phone to be rooted.
Can someone please figure out how to make my AirPods Pro 2 work with my MacBook Pro M1? Because they just don't work.
Libreated?
Libre!
I've gifted multiple pairs of AirPods to android users and they all seem to work fine
Who is buying these that isn't an Apple fanatic? If you aren't a fanboy, then any old pair of earbuds is both cheaper and better than AirPods.
Now I would like to see a software to unlock features for Tesla. You payed for the car, why pay subscriptions?
Jailbreak the Tesla.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWQL_XORalY
There is much better and much cheaper non apple air pods these days.
A list please
Just putting out that statement is kind of “ok and now”?
Precisely this. Lots of superior options. (I say this as someone who has AirPods but didn’t know any better.)
Which ones do you prefer?
Both the Bose and Sony offerings are, in my opinion, better sound quality and better noise cancellation than AirPods.
Many people are gifted a pair.
> much better
Citation needed
OT, but I am as disappointed in the firwmare of Apple airpods as I am in the one of Pine64 for their pinebuds.
The first is not hackable and the second promised much and delivered just an initial dump with dubious sdk license
im all for corporate witchhunts, but airpods have been one of the moat universally compatible items Apple has made out of the box?
Huh? I was always able to use AirPods with the Nintendo Switch, for example. Even share them with friends' phones. I didn't know they required "liberating" but good news I suppose.
I wish their displays could be liberated though
Great project
I wonder why people keep pouring energy into this bottomless pit of a vendor locker.
Surely, Apple will close this hole in the next version.
They're a user-hostile company. I stopped bothering with it years ago.
Yes, their hardware might be slightly better than the competition, but the difference is not earth-shattering. Certainly not worth all the trouble and uncertainty of what will happen next year when Apple improves their vendor locking.
My advice: stop feeding the beast, and start owning your hardware!
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Your psuedoscientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should!
Go on… you want ionizing emitters near your brain? Unlike others here, I’m keeping an open mind for now, but do not know what you are talking about.
Huh? I've used all my airpods with my linux and android systems.. nothing was liberated.. just more features were added