iPhone 16 Pro randomly connects to Echo Dot devices via Bluetooth

Thank you for making this thread- I've been experiencing this and it's deeply frustrating! I didn't realize this was the issue until I found this thread- my bluetooth audio quality would suddenly crash for a few seconds at random intervals. I finally noticed that when it was happening, an "echo dot" would show up in my BT settings attempting to pair. I think my neighbors recently got an Echo Dot as I didn't have this happen until a couple weeks ago (still on 18.6.2 so a new update didn't cause it).

Hope they release a fix soon- aside from the convenience issues this feels like a pretty serious privacy and security violation that random devices like that can attempt pairing with our phones.

It is a smart scale and my guess was that was trying to connect to scales all the time and got confused by echo dots.

i do have Alexa’s in the house and sidewalk is off and I did turn Bluetooth off in Amazon Alexa app along with background app refresh.

btw - taking no credit just had more inside

https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/s/3KiSB4sDwY

You say in your reply that, “your iPhone will not attempt to connect to anything via Bluetooth until it is placed in pairing mode.” This is incorrect.

I’ve had intermittent slowdowns when using my home wifi and it wasn’t until

today that I got a clue about the possible cause. I had seen and known about the Echo device BT problem for some months now and have tried all the possible solutions I could find, with varying success.

But today when my wifi became unresponsive I toggled wifi in Settings and when I attempted to reconnect I got an error message that I had too many BT devices connected. Upon checking, I had 8 of my Echo devices actively connected to my phone’s BT. Some of these I’ve never connected to via BT, ever, and others are ones I connected to and then forgot to try to keep them from doing this again. They were already connected (and others were trying to) when I opened the BT settings, as indicated by the error message.

FWIW, my kid and spouse have the same model phone as I do, same iOS version, and have never run into this problem.

Eve, if it helps, the name of the device in BT settings is the model and the last 3 characters of the serial number. So “Echo Dot-1XY” corresponds to, say, “Kitchen Dot” in my home.

It’s a pain to look each one up but I’ve noticed it’s consistently about half of my devices that are causing the problem. They don’t share any single feature (different models, generations, etc.) because that would make troubleshooting too easy.

With the latest iOS update, I am still having the same issue. This problem have been there for about 3.5 yrs based on my observation. With every major iOS update, I hope Apple can solve this problem. Apparently, apple engineers have not taken the issue seriously. They are probably being overpaid and there is no incentive for them to solve the problem. In fact, commercially Apple makes more money by leaving some bugs in the system.

The issue I have is as described by the original title, i.e. bluetooth randomly connects to neighbor's echo dot devices (or something similar), which cause audio from AirPods or other bluetooth earphone including Bose's earphone to become garbled, slow down or briefly stop for several seconds. This has been an annoying problem for many people. I can not believe Apple will let such an easy to fix problem last so many years.

Thank you for your detailed answer. I understand your points. Asking neighbors' help to solve this problem is not practical. I am not a computer programmer, but I think Apple engineer could just offer us an option to disable any additional bluetooth device connection while a bluetooth audio device is connected to the iPhone.

As you can see, my iPhone randomly connects my neighbor's echo dots devices (2nd bluetooth devices on the screen shots) when I am in close range to all the neighbors having those bluetooth devices which does not require password to connect.

Kevrium wrote:

Thank you for your detailed answer. I understand your points. Asking neighbors' help to solve this problem is not practical. I am not a computer programmer, but I think Apple engineer could just offer us an option to disable any additional bluetooth device connection while a bluetooth audio device is connected to the iPhone.

If you have an Amazon app or Alexa app on your iPhone that’s what the echo dot is connecting to. BLE connections can only be to apps, not to the device the app is on. And that is a BLE connection.

And, as I mentioned, they are not causing interference, something else in that neighborhood is causing the problem.

Any resolution? I am having the same issues with IOS 26