Reply to post: Re: you need to have both GPS and Bluetooth turned on to use it

Re: you need to have both GPS and Bluetooth turned on to use it

"On android I believe location services have to be enabled in order to use bluetooth"

Your belief is wrong; Bluetooth and location services on Android are entirely separate things.

As for whether it needs location services to work, it seems a bit weird. I just tried installing it to check, and there was no mention of needing location services. Turning bluetooth off made ithe app immediately complain and refuse to do anything else until turned back on, but turning location on and off made no difference. However, there are reviews on the Play store going back to at least February which claim location services are needed to make it work.

In addition, the description of the app says this near the end:

"The Bose Connect app does NOT use GPS or your device's location for anything."

which seems to be protesting rather too much for an app that doesn't ask for permission to see your location or have any reason to want it. I've never seen an app feel the need to make this kind of declaration before. Given all this, I suspect that the lawsuit has been coming for a while, and El Reg did their test before the new version was released (on March 16th) which removed the need for location and goes out of its way to deny it would ever want something like that. The lawsuit has only just been filed, but could easily have been a month in the works with journalists lined up to publish once the filing is public. A flood of bad reviews on the Play store in the last couple of days suggests they've planned a bit of a media offensive to coincide with the filing.

Alternatively, maybe the app is just terribly written and forces you to turn location on once it's connected to something (I don't have a Bose speaker, so it never got past the connection stage) even though it doesn't actually have permission to access it.