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Wednesday, 25 October 2017

Huawei P10 Lite Bluetooth disabled after restart

Soon after buying my Huawei P10 Lite Android phone I discovered that restarting the phone would turn Bluetooth off. This is quite inconvenient as I regularly turn the phone off, and also regularly use Bluetooth to listen to podcasts in the car. I contacted Huawei support, not expecting a prompt or useful response, and was impressed to get a technical answer within a day. They suggested that I wipe the cache partition, which proved unsuccessful. I replied, and they then stated that:
"the phone's Bluetooth behavior is correct. The Bluetooth turns off after a restart, so that the phone boots faster and the battery is conserved (in case Bluetooth was left on by accident)."
Interestingly, today I discovered that both of these responses were incorrect, and that there is a setting hidden deep within EMUI 5.1's convoluted menu structure which will fix the Bluetooth issue.

In Settings go to Security & privacy:



Then Location services:



Select from the 3-dots menu Scan settings:



And finally turn Bluetooth scanning off.


Once again, in summary: Settings | Security & privacy | Location services | 3 dots | Scan settings | Bluetooth scanning.

I have no idea why this allows Bluetooth to remain on after restarting, and apparently neither do Huawei. Note that this also affects other brands. I found this solution on a Lenovo support forum relating to the Moto G5 Plus.