BLE Channel Sounding with nRF54L15 — which smartphones are actually supported?

[Timofey Solovev]

Hello everyone,

I’m a student currently working on a university project related to BLE-based positioning using the nRF54L15 and Channel Sounding.

In the documentation and vendor materials, I’ve seen references suggesting that Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 support Channel Sounding. I haven’t personally verified this yet — this is based purely on the published information.

I’d really appreciate any practical clarification from those with real-world experience:

• Which smartphones (other than Pixel 9 / Pixel 10) are known to support BLE Channel Sounding?

• Are there any devices that have been actually tested with nRF54L15?

• Any recommendations on choosing compatible devices for Channel Sounding experiments?

This is an academic project and, unfortunately, I don’t have the budget to purchase Pixel devices, so I’m trying to identify workable alternatives.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can share insights or experience 

Timofey

[SwRa]

Hi Timofey,

Software support for Channel Sounding was made publicly available with the release of Android 16, which introduced the Ranging Manager API, so I guess phones that have BLE 6.0  and above with android 16 should work (I am not sure which phones have it at the moment).. The best pick for channel sounding is the google pixel series as you are aware and we have done testing based on the pixel 10.. I can check with the team if they have done testing on any other phones.

Regards,

Swathy

[PaKa]

You can sell phones labeled as Bluetooth 6.0 without supporting Channel Sounding so not 100% enough to qualify the feature. You can't have Channel Sounding on phones not being Bluetooth 6 so you can eliminate a lot of phones though.

There is no compiled list of phones supporting what features but we use the Pixel 10s internally as Google pushes in new technology onto the Pixel phones before you see it other places. The OnePlus 13 should support Channel Sounding but not tested.