No indication of bluetooth activity in indicator

[Michael Zanetti]

The Bluetooth icon in the panel is currently an outline icon when Bluetooth is turned on but nothing is connected, it will turn to the filled icon when something connects. Additionally it would be useful if the icon would turn blue when there is actual traffic happening. This is something I've been used to from previous phones and it helps greatly to identify the state of the connection. For instance, the Music player playing music to a Bluetooth headset would be immediately visible when you've put the headset away already and forgot to stop the music player.

Also, it causes bug reports of failed connections to be more detailed as this gives details to the developer whether the connection failed when establishing the ACL link or if something failed after a profile has been connected already.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, that's sort of similar to bug #761766

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bluetooth#Bluetooth_icon describe icons use but none specific to your usecase

[Simon Fels (morphis)]

This gets a bit tricky when you want to define what actual "traffic" you want to indicate. Just count HCI frames on the link doesn't make sense as those don't mean anything goes to a remote device.

This should be more or less happen on a per-profile level. When a profile becomes connected this needs to be indicated somehow. I've pushed support for this yesterday upstream (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.bluez.kernel/64957). This is something we could reflect in the indicator details or in the settings app. The indicator icon should only reflect that bluetooth is turned on and that we're connected. IMHO putting more details into this tiny icon just overloads it with too much details.

The other part is for the special use case of a profile. Indicating that we're playing music is really up to the sound indicator. If you want a clearer indicator where your audio goes to than this needs to be reflected in the sound indicator too. We don't have the option for the user right now to switch between speaker, earphone or bt audio when playing music. A2DP currently gets the highest priority here.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.