CoreBluetooth drops connection on WatchOS 8.0.1

Since WatchOS 8.0.1 CoreBluetooth drops an active connection if the App goes to background (or back to foreground). This can be reproduced easily with this sample code:

Interacting with Bluetooth Peripherals During Background App Refresh If you run the app on the Apple Watch and turn your wrist, an active connection is terminated.

In the output window you can read:

2021-10-20 20:22:41.210839+0200 BARBluetooth WatchKit Extension[382:94603] [BluetoothReceiver] disconnected from Sender.

The same is the case with my other Watch Apps, that are connecting to BLE devices. As far as I remember, with WatchOS 8.0 everything was fine. Since this occurs even on WWDC21 sample code this must be a bug. Is there a way to fix it for myself, or do I have to wait until it gets fixed by Apple?

  • Have you reported this in a bug ticket through the Feedback Assistant?

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Maybe the example is not the best one, but if you remove the lines from the code, where the device is disconnected, you can see the problem quickly, if you turn and rise the wrist.

Adding the bluetooth-central UIBackgroundMode solved this issue for us in debug mode. The problem is that we fail to upload the app since there because of missing com.apple.developer.bluetooth-central-background entitlement.

The problem is that we didn't find a way to add this entitlement in the portal or in Xcode.

I opened a DTS and waiting for a reply.

  • Any news regarding this?

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