Bad Implementations

Bad implementations are a big risk to standards, especially to emerging ones. Users can never experience and appreciate the specification of a standard directly. Only via products that claim compliance to the standard.

Of course there are tests, but at the standard qualification test it is impossible to conduct the most important tests: quality, stability. And also user experience is almost always out of scope.

"Bluetooth never worked for me" - told me once a man responsible for smart home strategy at a tier-1 platform provider. And it did not matter how much I could pitch to him the virtues of Bluetooth mesh. "No... Bluetooth does not work. It has problems connecting, it has problems with interoperability, I don't like this technology." he kept on repeating. 

He left the company since then and I'm now hearing they like Bluetooth a lot.

But I could not even blame the guy. It was his experience. He certainly was unlucky to experience badly implemented products. And formed his opinion based on them.

Bluetooth is a complex technology. And implementing the Bluetooth subsystem properly in a platform is not a trivial task. The so called "stacks" offered by chip companies are very often no production-grade and are missing important components (the difficult ones). It is quite easy to build a proof of concept. But getting that to a product level is a humongous task. Probably exceeding budgets (and time-to-market expectations) of most implementers.

Not looking too far, I had a number of bad Bluetooth experiences with my Garmin watch recently. I still think the fēnix platform is the best smartwatch ever. But unfortunately it is undertested in many areas. It reboots from time to time, fails to connect, fails to record a GPS position etc. Once I even caught it showing completely wrong GPS altitude (see the photo) while taking off at Frankfurt airport. By no means is Frankfurt 1000 foot below sea level.

So recently I thought I'd try listening to an audiobook during my daily morning run. I paired Apple AirPods with the watch, uploading several chapters over USB the day before. On the run it played one chapter and then stopped. And despite many efforts (including resets) I could not get it to play anything else. In the end it said there was no audio content on the watch (and it changed its mind on the next day). Clearly the "music" feature is broken on the D2 Delta variant. Perhaps on other models too. If I was to draw an opinion based on this experience, it would be "wireless su**s". While it does not. But that implementation clearly does.

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