Comment by danpalmer
11 days ago
As the owner of many airtags and some Airpods who has switched to Android, this is infuriating. I get beeps and unknown tracker notifications multiple times a day.
There are technical limitations in Apples design that prevents Android or anyone else from fixing it.
I left iOS because of degrading UX, and the UX of these products has got even worse as a result.
Vendor/ecosystem lockin, all on purpose, to give as much friction and annoyment as possible without flatly refusing the service which is generally bad for PR and apple does care about keeping their image up. This is their typical behavior for a long time, their primary mission is to force you into their ecosystem, not selling specific hardware (with 30% margin but still at the end they don't care about that).
Try running airpods pro against any android phone. Severely degraded experience on purpose to the point of rendering them worse than chinese 10$ aliexpress buds and practically useless. Wife had them, worked fine with iphone mini 13 but she hated iOS with passion so eventually reverted back to samsungs. She had to give airpods pro to her sister who still has apple phone and bought some cheapish buds for 50 bucks which work flawlessly and she is happy again.
Maybe engineers at apple are consistently incompetent to implement basic bluetooth unlike any chinese sweatshop, but somehow I refuse to believe so.
I agree with the lock-in, but FWIW I love using my AirPods with my Android phone. They basically work great. I can't change settings on them, but I haven't done that since I set them up. They sound nothing like $10 aliexpress ear buds, they remember and auto-pair to my phone, two laptops, and an iPad. Totally usable.