AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Thank you. I've noticed this with multiple headphones, but they have all been inexpensive models.

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...

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.

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?

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.

Are HTML5 video, canvas and WebGL not replacements? What in particular do you feel has not been replaced?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

Maybe there's something up with your phone?

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.

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.

What sort of laptop/desktop do you have? I regularly use my AirPods with my Steam Deck and they work great!

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

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.

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.

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 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

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'm not opposed

Which of the three battery level values should be reported in the one slot Bluetooth provides?

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.

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.

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.

You can turn it on and off with long presses on the airpod stalk itself.

Imagine having to charge your earbuds lol

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.

An incomplete list here but most aren’t a license that compels them to contribute anything.

https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

Look up Swift

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