> If it's truly difficult to use non-Apple headphones with the iPhone

Huh what? At least the large brands have pretty much zero issues.

The exception is battery power indicators (AirPods don't show power level on Android phones, and JBL's PartyBox and Anker's SoundCore don't show power level on iOS/macOS devices), and for older wired headphones the behavior of the buttons may be weird depending on if they have been designed for Apple or for Android.

I've got the soundcore q45 and battery display works fine on iphones and macbooks.

sound quality is potato level in calls, though.

Yeah but that's common across all headsets, including AirPods. As soon as the microphone is enabled, it falls back from high-quality AAC to the ages old SBC profile.

If there's one thing I can't understand about modern wireless voice comms, it's this. We can push megabits per second of pixels, with low latency, over wireless with miracast, but can't figure out how to push 16-20 kHz of 8-bit audio signal full duplex? It makes zero sense.

The problem is processing power. Encoding of anything takes a lot of battery power, so the complexity must be kept at a minimum.

That said there is a successor called LC3 [1], but hardware support for it has been lacking as it's a relatively fresh standard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LC3_(codec)

FWIW, I've found outside of the apple ecosystem that Bluetooth just works. Everything supports pairing to multiple devices. I have a M1 MBP that I sometimes use non-apple Bluetooth headphones with and I can't say it is any different than android or windows.

You will get problems if you buy no-name things from Amazon, but you always get problems when you buy anything no-name off of Amazon.

You will also get problems if you use Linux of course (even with good headphones), but that obviously goes without saying. Yes yes I am sure you can get Bluetooth to work reliably in Linux by just recompiling the kernel and change your alsa config to use jack to remap your output to yada yada yada... No thanks.

Bluetooth isn't as finicky as it appears when you use non-Apple products. After the initial pairing process, I can connect any of my devices to any other device with a bluetooth radio, and all I need to do is occasionally tell one device what my intent was if it connects to the wrong thing (say, connecting to my car instead of my headphones. Or connecting to the wrong TV).

Some cheaper devices are more difficult (I have a super cheap bluetooth receiver for an old car where you need to turn on the BT on the phone before turning on the dongle) but nothing along the lines of "unpair, repair, unpair, repair".

The behavior of Apple devices interacting with non-Apple devices is an intentional design choice by Apple to NOT support seamless interoperability. That's very different from the underlying tech being inferior to Apple's proprietary solutions.

Have you used a bluetooth device in the last 8 years?