Stop auto-switching between bluetooth devices?

[rexone]

Okay, I get what Apple is trying to do with making our experiences seamless blah, blah, blah but sometimes this stuff is nothing short of infuriatingly annoying outside of the lab.
The whole idea of your bluetooth connections jumping around by themselves is the thing that's driving me nuts.
It seems every single device you have ever connected to is set to default 'auto connect' meaning you effectively loose control of how you are using your bluetooth stream or devices.

A couple of examples for you...
- I am in the yard, listening to music streamed from my phone to BT speaker. My partner drives into the garage & my iPhone decides I no longer want to stream to the speaker. Apparently what I want to do is to connect to the car. So it switches. The car is then turned off so the connection drops & I then have to go to my phone & manually restart music as it has reconnected to my speaker but it's stopped playback.
- I am on a Zoom call on my iMac using my AirPod Pros for audio. My phone rings. The AirPods auto switch to my phone, cutting off the Zoom audio. I then have to manually reconnect the AirPods to the iMac when I wrestle control back from the phone.

I get that I can go into each device while I am connected to it & turn it to 'when last connected' but this setting seems to often not be respected &, as I said, every device in your list seems to be on auto-connect by default so you have to connect every device and then change the settings.

Is there not a simple OS & iOS wide way to stop these auto-connections?

 

[Shirasaki]

No. There’s absolutely no way to alter this behaviour besides disabling auto connect. I am in this scenario more often than not with AirPods Pro, an otherwise ok product completely ruined by random connection and weird priorities.
The more I use apple product the more I realise how non-magic they are, and all marketing appeals die off quicker and quicker as time goes on.

 

[cynics]

I can help with one of your issues.

Connect the AirPod to your iPhone and your head. Goto Settings > Bluetooth > (i) next to AirPods.

Tap on 'Connect to This iPhone'

By Default its set to Automatically. So if the iPhone is within range it will connect to them. This is great if you just grab you iPhone and wanted to hear some music. Unfortunately it switches for a phone call too.

Change the setting to 'When Last Connected to This iPhone'. Now it should only connect to them immediately when the iPhone was the last device it was connected too..

 

[rexone]

I can help with one of your issues...
Now it should only connect to them immediately when the iPhone was the last device it was connected too..

View attachment 1951021

Thanks @cynics, yes, I am across that setting & have changed it for devices however it seems to often not be respected by the iOS.
If I am actively using a different Bluetooth connection then obviously that active connection is the last connection yet it will still switch.
When it makes an unwanted switch and I check the settings 'last connected' will still be set but it will have ignored this setting.
Apple needs to either add an option to turn this auto-switching off or add an option to have a prompt displayed along the lines of a dialogue box that appears for 20-seconds or something and says 'Do you want to switch to device###'
There are two issues here I guess - the inability to have any great degree of control of a major function of the iOS and the existing setting not respecting the user preference.

 

[rexone]

No. There’s absolutely no way to alter this behaviour besides disabling auto connect. I am in this scenario more often than not with AirPods Pro, an otherwise ok product completely ruined by random connection and weird priorities.
The more I use apple product the more I realise how non-magic they are, and all marketing appeals die off quicker and quicker as time goes on.

@Shirasaki, I've been an Apple owner & user since 1995 when I bought my first Mac, an LC475, affectionately known as the 'pizza box' Mac.
The changes I have seen across that time have been awesome but they have also often been baffling & infuriating in equal measure.
One of the big things about Mac was always the ability for a user to really customise the OS to work the way they needed it.
The big things that now seem to exist in Apple are to remove many levels of customisation and an over-arching 'we know best' ideology. Some of the things that are removed and introduced in the OS & iOS leave me totally & utterly mystified - how could anyone, any real world user, have thought this stuff was a good idea.
You get the feeling that they develop these new ideas in an in-house echo-chamber where if a developer didn't use a function themselves they assume it therefore must be redundant and no one else uses it so out it goes. It's all too often change for the sake of change. As if some programming team is trying to justify their existence.
I'll give you two classic examples with the OS;
- Folder & files could previously be flagged with different colours. The whole file-name bar would be that colour, making it very easy to quickly identify colour coded files & folders, streamlining workflow & file management.
This was removed in preference for a tiny coloured dot beside the file name.
As someone that wears reading glasses & needs this colour coding for the reasons above this was a frustrating & seemingly pointless change.
Okay, so they want the OS to look more sleek, I get that, but surely it wouldn't overburden system resources to have the option for the full bar left there in accessibility settings or somewhere?
- 'Open folders in new window' was previously a system-wide setting that could easily be applied through Finder settings. Now you have to set this on a folder-by-folder basis through the bizarre process of selecting >View>Hide toolbar... from the menu bar and then the 'preference' resets once the folder is closed.
Yes, you can right-clight & select as you work but that's just a cumbersome step to workflow. I'm sure I wouldn't be alone in being someone who needs to have multiple folders from the same 'master' folder open at the same time as I work on a project.

Like I said, seemingly pointless changes & removal of the users ability to have any level of meaningful (or useful) control over their machines whether OS or iOS.

 

[deejinoz]

All the tech companies have realised that we are all so dependent on our technology these days that they can get away with producing sub-standard products and we will still come back for more. The technology industry used to be more user focussed and about how the technology can benefit humanity.

The tech industry now more closely resembles the worst end of the sex worker industry, where the tech companies are the pimps, giving us our tech drugs to keep us hooked and complaint, while they pimp our data out to any paying trick.

 

[deejinoz]

On a more directly relevant note, to the OP...

Apple and Microsoft both took a couple of decades before they realised it would be a good idea to make WiFi devices able to be set to not automatically reconnect to WiFi networks that have been previously connected to, in the UI.

Why they haven't made this minuscule leap of logic to Bluetooth devices is baffling. There are plenty of valid use cases where we would not want a previously connected device to automatically reconnect and yet this is still, after a couple of decades of Bluetooth, not a penny that has dropped with the tech companies.

They're too busy distracting us with window dressing changes to their technology, while they work out new ways to pick our pockets.