Another OEM uses Google Fast Pair to improve the performance of its phones

Pairing Bluetooth accessories to your Android device can be a pain. That’s why Google created Fast Pair, a protocol that reduces the pairing process to just one tap. Certain Android smartphones from Google and OnePlus can immediately detect when a Fast Pair-enabled Bluetooth accessory is ready to pair, while other devices may experience a slight delay in recognizing it. There is a gender. Xiaomi’s phones used to have that slight lag, but starting with the 2024 flagship model, it includes support for the Fast Pair responsiveness feature.

Fast pairing makes it easy to connect Bluetooth accessories like headphones, smartwatches, tracker tags, and mice with devices running Android or Chrome OS. This service is built into the Google Play Services app and scans for Bluetooth Low Energy packets advertised by Fast Pair-enabled accessories. When the service detects one of these packets in its scan, it searches Google’s Fast Pair database for the accessory’s details and displays a dialog asking if you want to pair it with your device.

To conserve battery life, your Android device or Chromebook does not continuously scan packets advertised by Fast Pair-enabled accessories. Rather, the device scans them periodically. This means that there can be a slight delay between when a Fast Pair-enabled accessory starts advertising and when the device detects the advertisement and displays the dialog. This isn’t very noticeable when the device’s screen is on, but it can be a little noticeable when you turn on the screen after the device has been off for a while, as it goes into a lower power state that scans less. . Frequently. That’s where Android’s Context Hub Runtime Environment and Google’s Nearby nanoapp come into play.

Context Hub Runtime Environment (CHRE for short) is an Android API that allows the OS to offload certain tasks to a device’s ultra-low-power coprocessor (often referred to as a sensor hub or context hub). This is beneficial because the device’s main application processor (AP) consumes more power than the context hub. Offloading simple tasks, such as scanning for fast pair advertisements, to a context hub not only saves battery life but also improves responsiveness. This is because you can shorten the scan interval without significantly impacting battery life.

In early 2023, Google announced that some OnePlus smartphones would be “more responsive when you pair your phone with new devices, like earbuds, with Fast Pair.” This is because “CHRE’s power efficiency allows information to be prepared while the application processor is asleep, so it is almost instantly ready when needed.”

Google said it “looks forward to new partners incorporating support for CHRE,” but in the more than 18 years since then, there has been no word on whether new partners have actually added support for the API. . However, it turns out that Xiaomi’s 2024 flagship phone not only supports CHRE, but also leverages it to improve Fast Pair responsiveness, just like OnePlus and Google.

While looking into the Xiaomi 14T Pro, I discovered that it declares support for CHRE. I knew because there was a flag. android.hardware.context_hub Returned true for 14T Pro. A check of Google Play Console confirmed that Xiaomi’s other 2024 flagship phones have also declared support for CHRE, including the POCO F6 series, Xiaomi 14 series, and the base Xiaomi 14T.

Additionally, each of these devices comes preloaded with Google’s Nearby nanoapp. This is a small app distributed by Google to perform fast pair discovery on Context Hub. This nanoapp is also available on some OnePlus and Pixel devices that perform fast pair detection with context hubs, but it cannot be exchanged between devices as it must be compiled for a device’s specific context hub hardware. . For example, the version I have on my Xiaomi 14T Pro was compiled for MediaTek’s Context Hub, codenamed “tinysys”.

“Nearby” is the name of the underlying connectivity library that Fast Pair and Quick Share depend on. Speaking of Quick Share, Google said in a 2023 blog post about CHRE that “this technology powers other features in Android, like Nearby Share, and improves responsiveness when sharing files with friends from your phone. I imagine it will be possible.” However, we don’t know if Google has actually started offloading all aspects of Quick Share to Context Hub. The company is already offloading a large amount of tasks to context hubs, including the Pixel’s car accident detection feature, but nanoapps isn’t open source so we don’t know exactly which features will and won’t be offloaded. It’s difficult.

Either way, it’s good to see OEMs like Xiaomi working with Google to improve the user experience, even if it’s a small change that most people won’t notice. However, CHRE can do more than just make Fast Pair more responsive, and adding support for it could bring further benefits in the future, such as bringing Google’s car collision detection capabilities to more devices. may be obtained.