I have an Android (and Nokia/HMD) question. After updating to Android 14 my Nokia G42 5G lost AAC codec over Bluetooth support, which downgraded some of my headphones as they are falling back to SBC (more noticeable on some headphones than others and these are without aptX* support, which is still working fine). Developer Options doesn't change it. Has anyone else seen this? I already factory defaulted the phone and recently updated to the April 2024 patch with no change.
There doesn't seem to be an answer for this (I still looked around a lot) but this issue affected my Bose NC 700 headphones a lot (using SBC with the Nokia paired to that headphone dropped the audio quality noticeably). I'm planning on using the 700s while traveling soon as they have the best noise canceling of what I have. Anyway- a couple of inelegant workarounds seem to be:
wired directly to the phone (NC still works with an analog connection) -or- cable connected to a FiiO Bluetooth clip.
which will make it quasi-wireless but can use a much shorter cable if I wear the clip on a shirt or jacket collar. It's receiving aptX-HD from the phone and cabling that with the headphones sounds pretty okay.
I can also use an older phone with AAC over Bluetooth support as a dedicated music player but when I am traveling I don't like to juggle phones around much unless I have to.
As an update, there is more going on with the Nokia than just that (audio via speaker is inconsistently working). I don't think there is anything wrong with the hardware, but more that it didn't agree with the Android 14 upgrades. I'm replacing it before traveling but after I'm back I will see if I can force downgrade/re-image it back to Android 13 (reset via the settings menu on 14 doesn't fix things). Looking around quickly I don't see a LineageOS ROM for that model or a factory image.
The cool thing about this phone is that there is hardware replacement support via iFixit (and that was one of the reasons I went with this one) but what would really be helpful also is a ROM archive of releases. https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Nokia_G42_5G
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