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
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 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
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.
Though I wonder why it works with Linux, which I assume doesn't have code for a special handshake specific to AirPods
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.
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.
I will suggest to the app developers to add optional silence. Thank you.
> Need fix please
> original engineers got laid off thats why
https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage
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).
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
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.
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.
It had a great number of CVEs, you mean?
_modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.
> 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
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.
- 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
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).
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'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?
I've had almost all of the versions of AirPods and AirPod Pros and they have connected to non-Apple devices just fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45882203
And DMA/DSA are also getting nerfed :(
It's basically the consequence Google v. Oracle and the cases leading to it.
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.
They should be slammed by Bluetooth body and forbidden to use bluetooth technology for hurting interoperability.
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.
They’ve always been able to.
The ignorance of Apple haters never ceases to amaze.
They can and should do better though by android.
Btw it's not some magic feature set they spent years to research. Sub $60 Soundcores have most of them if not all.
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.
Are we really at the point where people expect big brother to handle our headphone issues?
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
So f*ing steamed. Still. And Apple support had no clue and kept telling me it should all 'Just Work'.
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.
Or am I missing something that distinguishes between these two in your view?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Whataboutism and cynicism about the status quo notwithstanding, I do agree BT protocol and adherence to it could be improved though.
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 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 :)
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.
I know that used to be the case a few years ago at least, but I'm not sure if it's still true.
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! :)
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.
Did you have to do anything special?
Edit: I noticed that the article's page title is also misspelled this way.
Still baffles me why the first gen airpod "button" wasn't the winner, but unfortunately Steve's no longer with us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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 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.
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.
Going to change it to GPL, though. never paid attention to the license in use as I developed.
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.
No. They want to sell more i-devices so this is just punishment for not fully participating.
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.
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.
What would Apple even gain out of this? They don’t have a competitor to MS Teams, FaceTime is hardly targeting the same segment.
Just putting out that statement is kind of “ok and now”?
Citation needed
I wish their displays could be liberated though
The first is not hackable and the second promised much and delivered just an initial dump with dubious sdk license
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!
