Why is bluetooth icon always on ios11?

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.

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

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.

LaurenBrittany wrote:

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

It has nothing to do with your battery drain. Bluetooth uses so little energy the amount that it uses is unmeasurable. The same is true for Wi-Fi. See: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Battery Drain and other considerations for more information.

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.

joeyjohnson wrote:

Amazing how fast Apple fix very obvious bugs isn't it!

And no, that was not a compliment. Yet another bug thread with zero interest being shown. Galaxy here we come

Aren't you polite? You need to take at least 10 seconds to think, preferably BEFORE posting. First, it may not be a bug. You may be misinterpreting what you are seeing, or it may be displaying correctly. More important, if it IS a bug, at any given time there are thousands of known bugs in anything as complicated as a computer operating system (yes, an iPhone is a computer). Those bugs are analyzed for severity, and fixed in order of severity. A bug that causes the system to not work or to crash is clearly (I hope) higher priority than an icon that doesn't display correctly. And, there are over 1 billion iOS devices in use. Many more than the one device that you have. When a bug is fixed the fix needs to be regression tested; that means test to see if the fix broke something else. That process takes weeks or months. And it is essential, because if it is not thoroughly tested it could break a billion devices. And bugs are not fixed one by one; a bunch of them (hundreds sometimes) are packaged into a release. If they weren't you would be complaining that your phone was being updated on almost a daily basis.

But for you I think a Galaxy is the perfect answer. Because there are almost never any updates to its operating system, so bugs will remain bugs forever. And yes, Android devices have bugs also. Except they are rarely fixed, because routine updates almost never happen. Besides, you can then complain in the Samsung forums rather than the Apple forums.

BTW, the reason the thread has zero interest is first, that it isn't bothering a lot of users (only 6). And second, this is a user-to-user forum, and Apple doesn't read or participate except in very rare instances.

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.

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).

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.

Lawrence

The battery drain is not simply the transceiver power rating. Although a given transceiver (WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, etc) may be rated at some mw the battery drain for using that transceiver can be significantly greater depending upon design of the rest of the circuitry. There are amplifiers, noise control/filtering, signal processing, and discrete components involved all of which consume power. In other manufacturers phones in which this was analyzed a few years ago it was as high as 300 to 450 ma while a single transceiver was in use. Now, methods have improved for idle power consumption along with the other active signal processing power consumption. But there is a reason that the phone warms during heavy network usage and it means power is being used in a major way. As with all electronics some of that power is wasted as heat is produced.

So turning off the Bluetooth, and WiFi ( it putting it in airplane mode) may save power. Especially with Apple using WiFi for some location Sevices, etc.

I am an electrical engineer with extensive experience in microwave engineering going back 50 years, and I have been involved with cellular technology for over 20 years. I also designed a competing technology to Wi-Fi back around 1980; it was too far ahead of its time to be taken seriously. I am fully aware of all of the components involved in microwave communications. My "products" include the microwave landing system for aircraft carriers that was also used for the Space Shuttle. I have never seen numbers anywhere near what you are quoting for smartphones. If the numbers you are quoting are accurate battery life would be 2-3 hours with the phone idle and only Bluetooth on. It fails the "sniff" test. If that were true the phone would become too hot to hold after only a few minutes of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled. Yes, BT is not 100% efficient, but by your figures it would be 2.5% efficient, which is absurd. In reality a receiver (which is all Wi-Fi uses when not connected) is close to 90%.

As I have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on 24/7/365 and I don't see anything like that, I further question the accuracy. For example, today I disconnected my iPhone 7+ from power at 8 AM. I have been home all day, using the phone heavily, all on Wi-Fi. My battery at 9 PM showed 71% charge. As my 7+ has a 2100 mah battery it only used 630 ma, including illuminating the screen (the highest battery draw), the CPU, the GPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. By your figures the battery would have been dead in 3 hours. If you have actual references I can follow up on I will, but I believe it to be an unsubstantiated anecdote.

The best I can grant you is that cellular data and cellular voice use a lot of power; up to 500 mw if the signal is weak; perhaps that is where your information comes from. This has nothing to do with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. And it is why you want Wi-Fi on when you are using the phone, because it uses an order of magnitude less energy than cellular. And it is why the phone gets warm on long calls. You will note that it does not get warm when using Wi-Fi data or Bluetooth connections, or with these on when they are not connected.

The link that I posted earlier has the details; I won't repeat them here.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

I am an electrical engineer with extensive experience in microwave engineering going back 50 years, and I have been involved with cellular technology for over 20 years.

But, because you don't agree with the popular misconceptions about physics, that's irrelevant. Lawrence, it's about the feelings!

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.

Honestly I don't care about the battery usage... it's important (essential!) to have the gray icon because I need to know when and if my device is disconnected from an external bluetooth device!

This is the only one point of the thread.