Boosting Smartphones with Google Fast Pair: The Latest OEM to Join the Club!

Fast Pair on CHRE: How Xiaomi’s 2024 Flagships Boost Pairing Responsiveness

TL;DR

• Xiaomi’s 2024 flagship phones use the ultra-low-power co-processor to boost Fast Pair responsiveness.
• Fast Pair is a protocol that simplifies connecting Bluetooth accessories to Android devices.
• Xiaomi’s support for CHRE (Context Hub Runtime Environment) offloads Fast Pair scanning to the co-processor, making scans faster and more power-efficient.

Pairing Bluetooth accessories to your Android device can be a hassle, which is why Google created Fast Pair, a protocol that simplifies the process with a single tap. Google and OnePlus phones can quickly detect when a Fast Pair-enabled Bluetooth accessory is ready for pairing, but other devices may experience a delay. Xiaomi phones, however, are now catching up, thanks to a new feature that boosts Fast Pair responsiveness in their 2024 flagships.

Fast Pair is designed to simplify connecting Bluetooth accessories, such as headphones, smartwatches, or tracking tags, to Android devices. It’s baked into the Google Play Services app, which scans for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) packets that Fast Pair-enabled accessories advertise. When the service picks up one of these packets in a scan, it looks up the accessory’s details in Google’s Fast Pair database and then shows you a dialog asking if you want to pair with the device.

To save battery life, your Android device or Chromebook doesn’t continuously scan for these packets. Instead, it uses a CHRE, which is a combination of the Context Hub software stack and the companion firmware that runs on the ultra-low-power co-processor. This co-processor is designed to handle tasks previously reserved for the Application Processor, like preparing data for the CPU while it’s asleep, so it’s ready when it’s needed.

Google announced in early 2023 that select OnePlus phones would notice improved responsiveness with Fast Pair when pairing with new devices, thanks to CHRE’s power efficiency. But it was unclear if any new partners would actually add support for the API. Now, we’ve discovered that Xiaomi’s 2024 flagship phones, such as the Xiaomi 14T Pro, support CHRE and use it to improve Fast Pair responsiveness, just like OnePlus and Google do.

Each of these devices also preloads Google’s Nearby nanoapp, which is a tiny app that Google distributes to run Fast Pair discovery on the context hub. This nanoapp is also found on select OnePlus and Pixel devices that run Fast Pair discovery on the context hub, but it can’t be interchanged between devices, as it needs to be compiled for a device’s specific context hub hardware, like MediaTek’s "tinysys" hub on the Xiaomi 14T Pro.

While not all devices with CHRE support will automatically gain Fast Pair improvements, it’s great to see OEMs like Xiaomi working with Google to enhance the user experience, even if it’s just with small changes that many people won’t notice. CHRE can do a lot more than just make Fast Pair more responsive, so adding support for it could have additional benefits down the line, like bringing Google’s car crash detection feature to more devices.

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