Airplane mode is a feature that has been around in phones for a very long time. The name comes from the idea that the radios in phones can interfere with airplanes, so this allows you to turn them off without powering down the phone completely. Airplane mode has other uses, of course, but it’s not a terribly nuanced tool: one tap kills all radios. However, in Android 11 R, it may get a little smarter.
This blanket approach can be annoying if you want to quickly disable cellular and Wi-Fi, but you’re listening to music over Bluetooth. If you’re familiar with ADB, there’s already a method for customizing which radios are turned off with airplane mode. Of course, that’s not a consumer-facing feature and not something most people will bother with. A new commit in the AOSP Gerrit is titled “Context-aware Bluetooth airplane mode” and it sounds like a much-requested feature.
