Phone manufacturers universally adopted Bluetooth as the standard wireless protocol for peripheral devices.

Zigbee and other 802.15.4 protocols will always be at a disadvantage even for tasks the Bluetooth protocol is not suited for. Bluetooth chips are cheap and more widely supported than anything else because Bluetooth radios are manufactured at massive scale for the phone market.

The original poster was talking about scenarios with industrial devices and NOT for pairing with phones...

Bluetooth is already there, and if the same chip can be used in a phone or a button cell powered telemetry sensor, economies of scale kicks in.

And BTLE is specifically designed to work without the pairing dance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy

> Bluetooth is already there, and if the same chip can be used in a phone or a button cell powered telemetry sensor, economies of scale

Actually, for industrial applications, it's more likely to be Zigbee that is already there, and the economies of scale will favour it over BTLE (particularly when you consider Zigbee allows thousands of devices in a network, while BTLE can't even get to double digits). There's a ton of other advantages to Zigbee for industrial applications (not the least of which is resiliency).

Maybe you want a bluetooth bridge (though WiFi is probably very tempting for that purpose), but bluetooth is bad enough at doing its own job, let alone something else.