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Switching hearing aids between iOS devices

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Relatively new to hearing aids. Have them paired to my iPhone with no problem but now would like to also pair to my iPad. Do I have to turn off Bluetooth on my iPhone, turn off my aids, then turn on Bluetooth on my iPad and aids to pair every time I want to switch devices?

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It depends on the brand of hearing aids.
I know that my Widex Moment got confused when I had them defined as Bluetooth device on both my iPhone SE (2020) and my iPad Air (3rd Generation), but then I found I had Bluetooth active on both the phone and iPad.
In the end I deleted the Bluetooth HAs from my iPad to keep life simple.
I strongly suspect, but can not confirm, that you will have to follow the procedure you outlined in your original post in order to get successful switching of the HAs from iPhone to iPad and vis versa.

It does depend on the hearing aid. If you have GN Resound aids then there is a setting in the Smart 3D app which allows you to select “Optimised for MFI.”

This disconnects the app when it goes into the background and is supposed to allow you simply to swap between IOS devices, for example iPhone to iPad.

However I found that it’s quite unpredictable whether the aid will connect to phone or tablet and sometimes one aid would connect to one and the other aid connect to the other.

Also waiting for the app to reconnect every time you bring it onto the screen can take 15-20 seconds, which is a long time if you are trying to stop streaming for example, or reply to someone.

In any case if you turn the Bluetooth off, the aids will disconnect (which isn’t un-pair) from that IOS device and when you turn Bluetooth on on the other IOS device, they should connect to that. Whether you will have to restart the aids is another question. With Resound I found the One would generally reconnect ok but the Omnia often needs you to restart the aids.

I don’t know what brand you have, but my Phonak P90R connects to my iPhone and iPad simultaneously. That was a big secondary reason I chose them over other brands I tried. I seamlessly go from one device to the other. My Phonak’s can also be bluetoothed to six other devices, however, not simultaneously, I would have to pair them and lose my simultaneous connection to my iPhone or iPad.
However, I also have the Phonak TV Connector and I can turn that on and listen to TV without the need to pair to it again, and it doesn’t unpair from my iPhone or iPad.

Interesting topic. And confusing to me.

I had the KS10/Phonak. Normal Bluetooth. Now I have Philips 9040 and am getting back to MFI and trying to figure it out.

Here is the way I think it’s supposed to work with MFI: I pair both my iPhone and iPad with the hearing aids. Whenever I start streaming any audio source on my iPad the automatically connect to the iPad. Start an audio stream on the iPhone and the HA disconnect from the iPad and automatically connect to the iPhone. In theory. Totally automatic. Nice.

There are reliability issues. But I don’t think that it’s MFI. We have the Philips Hearlink app that gets in the middle of things. I would probably delete this app from my devices and have a solid experience with just MFI and my hearing aids - except that the app has a streaming sound equalizer that I need - these hearing aids sound absolutely terrible w/o the equalizer. So things get a little flakey and I haven’t totally figured out yet all of what’s going on.

But I think that’s the basic idea of how MFI is supposed to work, and I like it.

I have Oticons and the procedure you outlined is more or less what I have to do though the exact steps varies every time I make the switch. At worst I may even have to do a “forget device” in Bluetooth pairing on iPad and pair again. I’ve even been forced to reboot the iPad occasionally when switching from iPhone to iPad.

I also trialed Phonaks which can hold multiple connections simultaneously but, since they are not , suffer from other disadvantages.

Thanks everyone for your input, I am always amazed at everyone’s willingness to help on this site. Guess I will continue with the process I am using, was hoping there was something simple.

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