Some uses I know about:

1.) Indoor location (uses beacons to improve accuracy). This is transparent to app developers which used fused location provider and just results in very accurate locations.

2.) Bluetooth fast pair - https://developers.google.com/nearby/fast-pair/spec This is for feature parity with Apple "magical" AirPod pairing. You open the headphone case and immediately the popup appears asking you to connect them.

3.) Nearby APIs for device-to-device comms without internet https://developers.google.com/nearby

4.) Instant tethering for feature parity with Apple macos + iPhone tethering - https://support.google.com/pixelbook/answer/7504779?hl=en

If I disable Bluetooth I don't expect these features to be working...

So you disable bluetooth...and then you are expected to pair with bluetooth headphones/airpods or connect to other devices(i.e mac) ?

> Why would you want to turn bluetooth off but not really turn it off?

A typical case I used to see is "let me switch off bluetooth so that my car doesn't keep connecting while I connect it to your phone" combined with "hey, how come my watch isn't connected to my phone?"

Now it works as the user expected.

This isn't how you or I might expect it to work but I suspect it satisfies most users' mental models.

This isn't intended to praise or condemn the behaviour, I'm simply responding to your question.

Probably apps like Tile, that don't need to have full Bluetooth connectivity, but still want to scan for Tiles every once in a while.

Any unboxing experience. I mean, naively this means that the doodad you just bought (like the IoT Sous-vide heater I got for Christmas) requires you to fumble with your settings to turn BT back on before you can pair it.

Now, sure, I'm sure the response of the people here is "But I turned it off because I want to have to use settings to turn it back on." And that's fine. But that's not the use case for most users, I strongly suspect. Having a phone that just works with crazy kitchen gadgets is something of real value.

I think you are right. I don't like it, but as a user, I appear to be in a minority. My wife is not concerned about tracking nearly as much as I am. She was ok with ads disappearing from her Kindle, but she does not want to fiddle with anything. And to be perfectly honest, the older I get, the harder it is for me to devote time to do that as well. I even accepted BT pairing in car. That said, I already placed a line in the sand on BT for oven/fridge/toaster/younameit.

I’m suspicious of your reasoning.

Do you have any support that users who turn off a feature — such as Bluetooth — want it to continue to “just work”?

That seems opposite of their expressed intent in turning the feature off.

my Bluetooth headphones don't support pairing with multiple devices. The easiest way to stop them from pairing with my phone when I want them to pair with my PC is to turn Bluetooth off on my phone. functionally, I don't care whether Bluetooth is off or not, I just want my headphones to pair with my PC. this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)

>> this has the added bonus of being easy to undo (turning on Bluetooth pairs with my headphones again)

I still seem to miss the "added bonus" compared with disabling the bluetooth completely.

sorry, I meant that it was an added bonus compared to keeping Bluetooth turned on and unpairing my device through the settings menu in my phone.

Perhaps one loves Google and would like to help them increase their understanding of the world.

on edit: changed you to one and your to the.

I don't think anyone should "love" Google. Sure I enjoy using some of their services, but at the end of the day they will sell every single detail they can gather about you to make money. That's not something to "love" even if they are using it for other interesting things.

neither do I, but the question was why anyone would want to track bluetooth devices available even when bluetooth turned off and that extremely unlikely reason was the only one I could think of.

Okay, well I completely misread your comment haha.