My partner keeps the Bluetooth antenna of her Android Pixel 4a (5G) on because she wears a Fitbit. On the occasion I want to use Bluetooth (e.g. in my car or via portable speaker), devices will ALWAYS connect to her phone over mine if she’s anywhere nearby. Sometimes it even steals the connection when I was already connected.

Why is this? Is there some way to steal the connection back?

It happened when I had a Pixel 4a (non-5G) and with a Pixel 8a. It’s especially maddening when it’s the audio stream in my car. I believe I’ve tried unpairing both phones, pairing mine first and then hers, and hers still ends up taking priority.

EDIT: Tech Support answers only, please. If I wanted to get trolled there are plenty of other places for that.

  • rob299English
    3·
    3 days ago

    Someone would need to remove the Bluetooth connection from your partners phone.

    1. they can simply turn off Bluetooth when you are using it the device.
    2. delete her Bluetooth connection form her phone that is connecting their phone to your device and they will have to reconnect it manually when they want to use it.
    • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Why should her connection even matter? If my phone was paired to the speaker first, shouldn’t it get priority? Or some other mechanism? Hers seems to steal priority no matter what.

      She uses a smartwatch and that requires Bluetooth. Plus she’s often upstairs listening to a podcast or something. When I turn on my speaker downstairs, it starts playing her podcast instead of connecting to my phone. Like man, I just want to listen to music, not inconvenience her.

      • running_ragged@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        My devices headsets, speakers etc will usually try to reconnect to last phone/tablet that it was connected to.

        If they connect to tue wrong one, You can usually trigger them to look for a new device, connect to it from your phone, then as long as your phone has BT on when its next turned on, it should connect to your phone first.

      • rob299English
        1·
        2 days ago

        I get it, but here why I think it might auto connect to hers first.

        If she always has Bluetooth on, it might just be detecting her device first in the moment and auto connecting to hers. I don’t think it’s considering who’s phone or smartwatch paired first.

        • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          Nope, I used the speaker 2 days in a row. Both times I enabled BT on my phone before powering on the speaker. Partner was upstairs, maybe 25 ft away if there was line of sight. I was standing right in front of the darn thing. It still connected to her phone first each time.

          • rob299English
            3·
            2 days ago

            idk why else it would do that unless it just prefers their device more or something.