alt Hacker NewsCurrently, on the AirPods side and not iOS side like the article covers, Apple breaks Bluetooth feature parity with other devices by not sticking to the Bluetooth spec with AirPods themselves.
For example, you need to root and patch your Bluetooth stack on your phone if you want to use all of your AirPods features on Android, and not because Android is doing something wrong, it's because the Android Bluetooth stack actually sticks to the spec and AirPods don't.
And even when you do that, you can't do native AAC streaming like you can with iOS/macOS. Even if you're listening to AAC encoded audio, it'll be transcoded again as 256kbps AAC over Bluetooth.
Even no name earbuds on Amazon manage to not break Bluetooth and can offer cross platform high quality audio over Bluetooth.
Replies
They do this on purpose if you didn't get it. Google will never "fix" this issue because they follow the spec. They shouldn't have to add an exception for AirPods.
Can headphones that stick to the spec actually play nicely with multiple devices? - switching quickly between phone and laptop like Airpods do?
On the other hand, there’s been a bug open to make a simple harmless change to fix this in Android for 9 months, with no response from Google other than asking for reproduction steps as far as I can tell.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238
Some comments on the bug accuse Google of intentionally not fixing it to make people buy Pixel Buds instead of AirPods.
I wouldn’t say that myself, but then again I also wouldn’t say that Apple intentionally violated the spec just to make AirPods not work on Android.