nRF Connect/Android 10 does not pick up extended advertising (Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact)

[Fredrik]

Hi all,

I upgraded my Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact to Android 10 recently and am no longer able to find BLE5 devices using advertising extensions in nRF Connect (or any other BLE scanner app for that matter). According to nRF Connect's "Device Information" page, extended advertising is supported. Legacy advertising works fine. I tried resetting all network settings and clearing the Bluetooth cache as suggested by Sony Support. I have not yet tried a factory reset. Has anyone else experienced similar issues with Android 10?

This seems like an issue with Android and not any Nordic tools/hardware. I am asking on the DevZone because I'd be hard pressed to find a larger forum consisting of astute BLE developers... If anyone knows of a better forum to ask this kind of question, please let me know, and I'll crosspost.

Best,

Fredrik

[Hung Bui]

Hi Fredrik, 

I will forward the report to our App team.

In the meantime could you verify that when the issue happens you still can scan for normal advertising packet and only the extended advertising packets are missing ? 

[Fredrik]

Thanks.

Yes, normal (legacy) advertising packets are scanned without problems.

[Hung Bui]

I got a reply, quoted as follow: 

When batching is enabled in nRF Connect, it scans with interval 500ms. From my experience a good results are reported when interval is > 5000 ms.

Although, I cannot confirm that AE would be found using batching even with such long scanning interval.

For better results (and much greater battery consumption) use interval = 0 (no batching).

So batch scanning should be disabled. 

[Fredrik]

Got it. Batch scanning is enabled by default on a fresh install -- you should probably change the default then.