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Android P lets you simultaneously connect up to five Bluetooth audio devices to your phone
- Android P enables up to five simultaneous Bluetooth audio device connections.
- The feature is only accessible via the developer options.
- Doesn’t offer multi-device playback, only multiple connections at once.
The Android P Developer Preview has been with us now for less than 24 hours and plenty of useful new features and tweaks have already been discovered. Thanks to the detective work of the folks over at Android Police, we can now add a slightly more niche feature to that list.
For those that have installed the Developer Preview, if you head to the usually hidden developer options menu you’ll now find an option to increase the allowed number of connected Bluetooth audio devices.
In Android’s current build, you can only connect up to two Bluetooth audio devices to your phone at the same time. Now, however, you can change this to either three, four, or a maximum of five.
Before you get too excited, it’s worth noting that this change doesn’t mean you’ll be able to stream your favorite Spotify playlists on five Bluetooth speakers all at once (unless you have speakers with multi-room support, of course). The change merely extends the number of paired devices you can have connected at any time.
To be honest, the likelihood of needing five audio devices actually connected, and not merely paired, to your phone at any given time is fairly low.
That being said, if you have more than two Bluetooth audio devices on the go – I have at least four in my home, for example – having the option to quickly switch between them with a single tap would be far more preferable than constantly disconnecting and reconnecting each time you swap to a pair of headphones or a particular speaker.
What do you think of this new feature? Would you find it useful? Let us know in the comments.