AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem (github.com)

A cool project, when you want to use AirPods outside of Apples ecosystem. Sadly, you have to use a rooted android device with a small patch due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238

This excellent.. there needs to be a macos version as well. Using Mavericks I was unable to adjust any settings on my airpods pro 2

Title has a typo, should be “liberated”.

Edit: I noticed that the article's page title is also misspelled this way.

Aren't airpods just bluetooth headphones?

How much effort would it take to get this working on Windows?

Excellent project, don't forget to upvote the Android bluetooth bug to give a signal: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/371713238?pli=1

Super cool. Also, this is an example of why having an open OS is awesome.

Cool project, not cool that it needs to exist. Apple isn’t only content to leech off OSS software, they have to force the existence of more of it to workaround what they closed off.

Huh? I've used all my airpods with my linux and android systems.. nothing was liberated.. just more features were added

Been using it with my airpods 3 anc on a pixel with custom rom (what a curious setup thinking about it). And it's good enough but kinda annoying the airpods don't seem to save my configs and connection isn't really stable. Not complaining since they're not even supposed to be supported tho, thanks for the free stuff ! I wonder if I'd be able to contribute better support with my very limited knowledge of bluetooth analysis...

Huh? I was always able to use AirPods with the Nintendo Switch, for example. Even share them with friends' phones. I didn't know they required "liberating" but good news I suppose.

I wish their displays could be liberated though

[flagged]

Tim Apple will not be happy about this.

Super impressive. Looks like the author also reimplemented Apple’s new Liquid Glads UI in Jetpack Compose?

This is needed even if you are IN the Apple ecosystem. I don't want to upgrade my phone to the latest half-baked iOS version, so Apple purposefully degrades the functionality of my new AirPods 3. Siri won't switch noise cancellation modes, I can't see the battery status, they get relegated to the "generic bluetooth device" section, and even the battery widget will display three identical headphone icons for headphones and the case.

How do I know this is done purposefully and not just because AirPods 3 are so new and different from AirPods 2? Well, macOS has been neglected of late, and Apple didn't find the time to break things there, so Airpods 3 work with macOS just as well as Airpods 2 did — switching modes, battery status display, etc.

It's very disappointing, and not a great customer experience.

Don't the Beats earbuds have literally the exact the same chipsets and speaker drivers as airpods, but play way nicer with Androids?

I know that used to be the case a few years ago at least, but I'm not sure if it's still true.

Mark Zuckerberg explicitly called out the airpod pairing being closed as unfair in a semi recent interview, maybe he can throw some dollars that way and get it all working nicely in some meta products.

Great project

A Show HN: thread submitted by the dev earlier in the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42610644

A Show HN: thread submitted by the dev earlier in the year, without traction here, but some background details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42610644

AirPods are my favourite headphones by a mile. I’d love to get microphone mode working on Linux without the audio sounding terrible.

I’d also be curious if anyone can offer insight on why the range is so much better when paired with my iPhone than my computer.

I’m trying to connect my airports pro 2 to my old, old 2011 iPod. It’s not going very well.

While I haven’t managed to find anything close to an answer using google, chatgpt is quite confident it’s because of Bluetooth versions.

Surely Bluetooth 5 is backwards compatible, but then again if the AirPods thinks it’s connected to an iOS device it seems reasonable that it will start using all the proprietary iOS features and then communication breaks down.

So to me, liberation of airpods is an on-device issue.

There is much better and much cheaper non apple air pods these days.

It seems to let you access head tracking data, so now I'm really curious if it would be accurate enough to use with games (eg, microsoft flight sim/arma 3/euro truck simulator 2 head tracking). There is probably a lot of other interesting use cases for it too, but I'm stuck with windows for now so :(

From a bit further down the page

> Bluetooth DID (Device Identification) Hook > Turns out, if you change the manufacturerid to that of Apple, you get access to several special features!

I hope Apple gets slammed hard by some regulatory body. Apparently there's absolutely zero magic reasons why their airpods are unable to connect to non-Apple devices; pretend you're an iPhone and you're in.

EDIT: read "unable to connect" => "unable to expose advanced functionality", ofc they connect just fine