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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Far_Set7950 on 2026-02-24 13:50:23+00:00.
turn old Android devices (Android 7+) into dedicated smart home control panels and BLE proxy gateways. Instead of letting tablets and phones rot in drawers, we can turn them into purpose-built infrastructure.
Over the past few months, I’ve deeply optimized the Bluetooth proxy layer.
Ava can now run a BLE proxy 24/7 without degrading WiFi performance, avoiding the common 2.4GHz congestion issues seen with ESPHome proxies.
On my A64 smart clock speaker and Samsung tablets, it has been running continuously and stably.
But here’s the bottleneck.
To better support Bermuda (room-level presence detection), I reworked the BLE scanning logic, especially targeting an old Android issue where low-end chipsets silently stop scanning.
The problem is: I don’t own enough BLE 4.0 devices.
Most of my hardware is BLE 5.0, which works almost perfectly.
If Ava is going to truly support older 2016-2018 era devices, I need more real-world validation.
If you have an Android 7+ device with BLE 4.0, preferably from 2016-2018
Requirements:
- Root access preferred (most old devices can be rooted)
- Shizuku also works if root isn’t available
- Install the APK
- Enable BLE proxy with Bermuda
- Let it run and report whether scanning stops or disconnects
Your feedback directly impacts low-level stability improvements and chipset compatibility.
If you’re using BLE 5.0, the experience is already very smooth.
But if we can make BLE 4.0 stable, Ava becomes viable on a much wider range of “obsolete” hardware.
Let’s see how far we can push old Android hardware.