Why is bluetooth icon always on ios11?

It's not a bug, its by design. As per the user manual:

https://help.apple.com/iphone/11/?lang=en#/iphef7bb57dc

The Bluetooth icon will be there and gray when bluetooth is on, but not connected to anything. It will be white or blue when its paired and connected to something, and it will change to a set of headphones when its connected to some speakers or bt headphones

Basically the BT icon is now supposed to be there always, unless BT is turned off from settings.

Perhaps reading the manual may be useful to you, so you understand how its supposed to work now.

Go to Settings/Bluetooth. Are any devices connected? Most likely at least one is.

You mean like this?

Settings/Bluetooth - OFF

Or like THIS:

Tap on the Bluetooth button in the Control Center.

Oh, you mean like this?

That was just from using the Control Panel "disconnect" button.

Lawrence

According to the manual the icon is supposed to have three main display states.

No icon displayed - Bluetooth Off

Icon greyed / dimmed - Bluetooth enabled / nothing paired

Icon Black / bright - Bluetooth enabled / device paired

It also is supposed to blink when it detects a device and it begins handshaking.

This is not happening, IOS 11.1 is bug filled and the Bluetooth icon issue is simply one of them.

Do you have an Apple Watch paired to your phone?

Sorry Phil..., that is how it’s supposed to work. It was how it worked on my 7Plus under IOS 10. The phone was upgraded to IOS 11. The Bluetooth icon dosen’t change whether paired to something or not now. Plus pairing doesn’t always work, I’ve have phone calls ‘dropped’ in the car hands free pairing where sound quality is poor or only one side of the conversation is heard. Pairing is taking longer when it does work.

Apple’s quality control is getting worse, this is the fourth release of IOS 11 and it still has major problems with basic functionality.

In the interest of clearing up misconceptions I performed a small test.

Charged an iPhone 6 Plus to 100% battery. Turned on Wifi and Bluetooth, and let it sit, for 2 hours with both on.

The iPhone is about 2 and a half years old with regular usage. so the battery has some cycles on it.

Did nothing on it for 2 hours so I could get as close to just Wifi and BT using power as I could. There may have been other processes there in the background though.

Guess how much the battery went down in those 2 hours?

Nothing, absolutely nothing. Still at 100% after 2 hours.

That means they are using less than 1% of power in 2 hours. But being generous I'll say 1% in those 2 hours. That means in 10 hours of regular usage they'd use a whopping 5% of overall power. Is that really an amount of power you really cannot really live without? And that's assuming they did use 1%. I'm pretty sure they haven't even used half of that.

Instead of spreading misconceptions and falsehoods, It would be better to actually have some empirical evidence of the actual power usage of Wifi and BT.

WiFi and BT use very very little power being on.

I'd trust Lawrence's expertise any day of the week on this.

That's fine then. Yes the icon at the top of the screen seems to remain white. That's a separate issue to the battery drain.

I was specifically answering DrMorbius who thinks Wifi and BT on will cause a significant battery drain.

And just to completely close out the experiment 12 hours later now, and the battery of the iPhone 6 Plus above is at 99% that's 1%.maybe over 1% in 12 hours.

I have the same problem on my iPhone 6. Pretty annoying, hopefully Apple will fix it soon. For the time being I just turned Bluetooth completely off as I don't know if it is going to drain my battery faster.

Same problem for me. iPhone 6s. I can't see anymore the light grey bluetooth icon. Either no icon (BT off) or icon showed as ON (no matter if any device is connected). I reported the issue here: Product Feedback - Apple

I’m also experiencing the always-on BT icon now. Confirmed no BT devices were connected. Missing the old gray icon when BT was enabled but nothing connected. Hope Apple adds that back in a future release.

Phil, as per your comments, that is not what the numerous other commenters are referring to.

The manual shows there are two different symbol statuses - grey when not paired, white/black/blue when paired.

Just like the other commenters, my bluetooth symbol is black at all times, as if it is paired with something, even when it is not paired with anything. My bluetooth is only paired with a device when I am in my vehicle. This began occurring when I got the newest update.

Glad others reported it. I am concerned it’s contributing to my battery drain.

schlemba wrote:

...Confirmed no BT devices were connected. Missing the old gray icon when BT was enabled but nothing connected...

No BT devices are connect and the BT icon is perennially white (or black).

Yes, it seemed like a major downgrade. I also have the BT always on but it only connects to my car. I noticed instantly that in iOS11 the icon never changed whether or not connected to the car. This is no good. Have Apple engineers overlooked this issue because all of them constantly use BT devices? It's common sense for this icon to let know if a device is connected. Now it only shows connected headphones as a separate icon next the BT icon. Devices like car audio systems are not shown at all unless you click your way into the settings.