S21+ Bluetooth drops briefly

[wenglish98]

We have a 2018 Camry, and this behavior is not present for my Pixel 4a and was not present for my wife's Pixel 4XL.

She has switched to a Galaxy S21+ which is paired with and auto-connects to the Camry. Periodically the car display will switch from showing the phone is connected to showing "no phone connected", and then shortly after her phone becomes connected again without any action by her. So far this has not happened during a call (but calls are very infrequent), but it will be a bit frustrating for her when driving alone to find that a call came in on the handset because at that moment Bluetooth was temporarily disconnected.

In case it is a doze/sleep issue, I turned off "Optimize battery usage" for Bluetooth, but the problem persisted after that.

I thought I read somewhere (but now cannot find) that Samsung introduced a newer variant of Bluetooth. If that is the case, can someone suggest how to make it use the older variant? I don't think Toyota will be updating the Bluetooth stack on 3+ year old cars.

Suggestions welcome. Thanks.

 

[VidJunky]

I too have an 18 Camry with their wonderful Entune radio. When I had my S20 everything connected fine and my podcast app would auto play when connected. When I got the S21 I had kind of a similar issue. It was easy for me though cause the connection issue cleared up by deleting the old device. Once the S21 was the top device, the only device in my case, everything cleared up except the auto play.

I've removed optimize battery for the app and forced it to never sleep but it doesn't matter it still acts like I'm starting it from totally closed and almost never auto plays.