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219 points zdw | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.015s | source
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maxlin ◴[] No.45897208[source]
If this doesn't fix the damn "audio quality goes to 10kbps if you also want a mic" I'm going to electrocute the devs responsible with the voltage common BT devices running this stack require.
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1. mort96 ◴[] No.45897364[source]
Why would they fix that in the standard when Qualcomm has a proprietary solution which generates royalties revenue for them? Qualcomm would probably vote against that when it comes up in Bluetooth SIG discussions

Same goes for A2DP with a remotely decent compression algorithm which doesn't sound like crap

I'm cynical enough to believe that these obvious huge missing parts of standard Bluetooth aren't accidental. They've surely noticed.

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2. rickdeckard ◴[] No.45898102[source]
Yeah, it's a dilemma. Modern times are no longer suitable for industry-wide standards.

Up until the 2000s, industry standardization groups were formed by companies which acknowledged that they need to team up and cooperate with each other to establish a mutual standard across several market-segments.

Nowadays we have companies who participate in those standards but don't contribute their work back to it, in hopes to secure a competitive advantage with a closed ecosystem.

What happens instead, is that they force other equally-large players to develop another proprietary standard to match them, and now the standards body is unable to find common ground between all members anymore.

Apple is the most egregious example of this, extending the Bluetooth spec in proprietary ways and not contributing any substantial implementation of it back to the standard (proprietary fast-pairing, linking BT-pairing to the Apple-ID instead of the device,...)

In today's times, Bluetooth wouldn't even be a standard. There would likely be equivalent wireless specs from Apple, Google/Qualcomm and Microsoft/Intel, none of them would work properly with each other because each team has its own set of accessories to sell...

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3. miki123211 ◴[] No.45898516[source]
Bluetooth was developed in a different time.

In those days, there was no single dominant phone or chipset manufacturer in most countries, much less globally. The phone was a device to access your carrier's plan, maybe with a few nice goodies on the side. Which plan you had was much more important than which phone you had. Phones were like cable boxes in many ways, most people don't know who makes their cable box, all they care about is whether they can watch ESPN and for how much.

Nowadays, you have three OSes that really matter, iOS, Android and Windows on the desktop side. Most people will only ever use at most two. You don't quite need a standard as much in an environment like that.

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4. rickdeckard ◴[] No.45900545{3}[source]
> You don't quite need a standard as much in an environment like that.

Who is "You" in that context?

[Large developer of a product]: You DON'T need a standard because you can strongarm your proprietary implementation into "your" standard (which is what is happening, as I wrote above), and as long as the user only buys products sanctioned by you, all is fine.

[Small developer of a product]: You DO need a standard because you are only able to participate and compete if you are able to match the experience of the large players in your market (which might also be the ones owning the platform your product connects to). For this you need equal access to those proprietary standards they may have created. This is however not in the interest of most of the large players, so you are actually not able to compete on equal grounds.

[Product consumer]: You actually WANT a standard, because a standard ensures interoperability across different types of products and vendors, and prevents vendor/ecosystem lock-in.

In these "different times", this fair and competitive market was a side-effect from this need for vendors to align in order to standardize across different areas, because they understood that "they cannot do this alone".

In the "nowadays times", there is a handful of companies large enough to do it alone, and they have an active interest to prevent the creation of an industry standard ("I want to enter the watch market, so I create a standard to connect my platform to a watch, AND I create a watch to control this value-chain end-to-end).

This "side-effect" of a competitive market is now gone and is ACTIVELY prevented by this handful of companies (see adoption and proprietary expansion/restriction of Bluetooth, WiFi-Direct, NFC,...)

5. bluGill ◴[] No.45900573[source]
Industry standards were done back then because customers demanded it. When a large customer (big company or government) says that you have to support a standard you support it, and if you don't like it you make the standard better. Even then everyone wanted their own version that wasn't standard because nobody wants you to be able to buy from competition. In turn, sometimes competition reversed engineered you - suddenly you realized you couldn't upgrade anymore unless you were compatible with the competition because customers were expecting compatibility with someone who only partially understands what you did: a few standards were written just so they could explain why this field that was always zero was going to change to a 1 with the next upgrade.