To clarify because this is confusing: The AirPods work as regular old BlueTooth earbuds on other devices already. This is an implementation of some of the extra features and interfaces that are integrated into Apple products.
How is it confusing? The top of the README explains it.
> LibrePods allows you to use AirPods features that are exclusive to Apple devices. It implements the proprietary protocol used to exchange data between AirPods and Apple devices
There's very little point having a discussion about something where other people can't even be bothered to properly read the link that was submitted - and even more frustrating when that link was literally a README file.
So far most of the "discussion" on this thread is why did he post this. He just posted what he thought others missed, if people find it useless it will further down the page. TLDR, I find the comments under that thread questioning why he posted even more pointless.
Recently, for the first time in over 15 years here, I've wished often for a "block user" function, so I can gradually weed those zero-effort zero-contributing users out. (If I didn't read HN across 4 or 5 different devices, I'd probably write a browser extension to allow me to do that...)
I know. That’s why I wrote the comment. I wasn’t responding to the repo, I was leaving some info for all of the other commenters who were confused about this.
That's not why one buys the AirPods. These things go with me from the iPhone to Apple TV, to my MBP, to the Mini. There is better sound available for less, but the sound is the least of the story.
If I remember right, there have been several Android applications that show the battery level of AirPods since at least 2021. For essential features in addition to being connected as an ordinary Bluetooth audio output and audio input device.
Why would they try to make the AirPods a worse purchase? Apple is happy to let you run whatever operating system on your Mac -- they aren't actively hostile there, but they don't help the community either.
Still, I would recommend the Sony WF-1000XM6 if you're not an Apple computer or phone user already. The UX is reportedly worse and a bit buggy, but the sound should be better.
You can configure them to pause them when you take them out of your ear, except when it is not an Apple device. They will refuse to do so, even though they clearly detect the event since you can no longer use the stem as a pause button when you do so.
Clearly they make it worse just because you didn't get an Apple device, so yeah idk what you're smoking but give me some.
The AirPods already work outside of the Apple ecosystem. This is just someone building out interfaces for their extra features that are already integrated into Apple operating systems.
Yeah I understand. But there are plenty of good headphones that work with Android and include most of the features. That's kind of the point of Librepods right? To bring AirPods up to par for non-Apple devices and make them a viable option for Android and/or non-Mac users. So "this working" means those features.
Since the AirPods are an offline device, if you buy a pair now they should work indefinitely. But perhaps it would be better to reward manufacturers that don't make you jump through such hoops to use the hardware that you bought.
Sure. But on the other hand it makes sense to reward manufactures that make good hardware. And AirPods are very good hardware for me so I'm perfectly ok rewarding them for it.
AirPods update while charging in their case and paired with an xOS device. You'll need to make sure that they never connect with an Apple product to "version pin" them.
I would be surprised if they could. Linux on Macs is still a thing. In fact, Linux on Mac is why I keep all the Macs we have in the house from the mid to late 2000s because they still turn on and work, if I choose to install Linux on any of them they are still usable.
They can. Require a valid signature from the mac's secure cryptoprocessor in order to interoperate. There's nothing we can do.
Remember when we used to use cryptography to protect ourselves from government and corporation espionage? Good times. Now cryptography is used by governments and corporations to protect themselves from us.
One day we'll need such hardware attestations to even get an internet connection.
Linux on older Macs, currently. I'd love to install Linux on my M5 (or even ARM Windows 11) but it's not possible due to Apple's lack of documentation and some other issues.
I realize your statement is subjective, but AirPods are made up of variants with plastic buds and variants that come with literally 5 sizes of squishy tips in the box.
So you have a total of 6 different fits to choose from. Plus the fact that there are surely dozens of third party tip options available for the Pro models.
The idea that anything with that many fit options can be considered the most uncomfortable earbuds on the market is not really possible in concept. That idea is as meaningless as saying that a size 9 Converse All Star is the most uncomfortable shoe on the market.
We are many generations removed from the original one size fits all product which was much different.
Basically all the annoying shit I have to handle with my AirPods is made up by how good of a product they are. I have nice headphones, speakers, studio and other microphones, etc for a bunch of use cases. AirPods are my workhorse. I haven't found anything as comfortable with as good a battery life and as good fidelity and as good price. The active noise cancelling is also very good.
This project is great. Hopefully one day AirDrop is liberated too. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop looked promising, but it seems stale. maybe one day.
It's less hostile and more lazy. The Airpods use standard bluetooth for everything that bluetooth has. The stuff that doesn't work on non apple platforms is the configuration, changing what the squeeze actions do and loading firmware updates.
There is no way to do this with standard bluetooth, you have to have a custom app for it. Apple just didn't build a custom app for other platforms but there is no reason they would care about someone else investing the resources in to building it. They still win because you bought the airpods and someone else spent the resources on making the app.
I've owned several pairs of AirPods over the years and this is the first I'm learning about some of their features. I almost found myself wanting there to be a third column for indicating Apple support (of course I'm being facetious).
It would be useful to explain to people who don't currently own AirPods and don't really follow Apple stuff much what features are lost when AirPods are paired with a non-Apple device.
> The aacp.rs and the att.rs files were translated from Kotlin to Rust with AI. Some parts of the media_controller.rs file, mainly the pulse integration, was also AI-generated.
you can grab a proprietary binary, open it up in IDA Pro (with MCP), spend some 10 minutes crafting a good prompt and after a few million (mainly input/cached) GLM 5.2 tokens you have a python script fluently speaking the proprietary protocol.
aside from https://github.com/mrexodia/ida-pro-mcp (which isn't mine) i have nothing i can publicly share. it's amusing how glm 5.2 jailbreaks itself, you ask it to quite literally break someone's software and it talks itself into it being a capture the flag competition.
I uploaded two binary save files from a game on my Steam Deck to ChatGPT, it diffed them and spat out a script to edit various values. The bots are really good at this sort of thing.
Not surprised at all; AI has dramatically lowered the bar to people wanting to create software they wouldn't otherwise have the time nor motivation to. Quality remains to be seen but IMHO it can only get better.
I feel the main useful feature that I’m looking for is the ability to use the unlimited multipoint on other devices. The 2 points that most other devices gives you is terrible. It would be nice to be able to quickly connect to my voip deskphone at work from time to time.
FYI android 17 fixes the bugs in the Bluetooth stack that previously required root to fix. But, this app still charges $5 for using features your air pods have. I'll be spending my afternoon forking and enabling them.
I get the idea behind wanting to fork and improve it, I truely do. I also get the idea behind wanting to see how the innards work.
However I'm a developer and I gladly paid the $5 so I can support the original dev for all the work that they have already done, and also for open sourcing it. I really don't want to maintain my own fork, sync it, build apks etc
I’m going to be honest I fell for the AirPods Pro 3 hype about it being the best noise cancelling of all time and I bought a pair. I found the noise cancelling worse than my $30 Anker Soundcore P30i, I could never get the hearing test on the AirPods to pass no matter what depths of a quiet room I went to, and the sound quality on music was worse than my Ankers. Don’t fall for the hype or at least order from Amazon like I did so you can return them. I could hear my AC running with the AirPods, with the Anker I had to ask my girlfriend if it was on.
I had the original AirPods Pro and they were really great until Apple nerfed them. Apparently the noise cancelling was too strong in some cases so they worsened everybody's. After that they started making ear-piercing squelching noises, rendering them useless. I guess they make a good paperweight and reminder to never buy noise-cancelling products from Apple.
There was some problem with the first gen that you would hear static, Apple replaced those if you contacted support. Happened to me just before end of 1 yr warranty and kinda funny but they had me mail in my airpods to be replaced and lost them. So they ended up sending me a new pair and iirc $100 gift card for the trouble.
I missed the replacement window by three weeks and they offered to “repair” them for $180. Was not impressed. Judging by resale prices on eBay, it’s always the right ear bud that goes bad on gen1 pros
I’m glad the Anker’s worked out for you, but the Soundcore brand almost completely turned me off from Anker. After two weeks the Soundcore buds I had stopped charging.
I have limited experience with noise canceling headphones (some circa 2008 active Sony earbuds, and some not-that-great Beats Studio Buds+. On a whim I bought AirPods 4 ANC and I’ve found them way better than I expected. Good enough for airplane noise canceling without the seal of most ear buds. They feel smaller than the beats buds, even with the stem. They seamlessly switch from my phone to iPad to Mac. I haven’t sat down to compare their quality to any of my other headphones, but I don’t really care. Nothing comes close to matching the convenience and the sound isn’t so bad that I each for something else. I did not expect to like them as much as I do.
Maybe it’s hype, maybe I don’t know what better noise canceling sounds like. These aren’t the Pros, so maybe there’s a difference.
I recommend Bose QuiteComfort Ultra 2. That's way better in terms of ANC and sound quality than AirPods or Powerbeats or any other products from same line.
My Pro 2’s get so much use it’s ridiculous. Great cancellation and they’re always on my person thanks to the case perfectly fitting that tiny right pocket most mens’ jeans have (vestigial watch pocket?) and not taking up any primary pocket space.
For real, after being on wireless earbuds for quite some time and going back to wired, it is absolutely incredible how many things the cords get caught on. Even just your own hands!
I ask because I find Apple's wired EarPods to be less... selective than AirPods are—by that I mean they'll pick up more background noise whereas AirPods seem to only transmit my voice—but EarPods' clarity exceeds AirPods if you grab the mic and hold it next to your mouth, which you obviously can't do with AirPods.
While consumer electronics companies have gone for wireless earbuds, the hi-fi, in ear monitor market is very much alive. Not to mention also relatively affordable these days.
AirPods themselves aren’t really that great from an audiophile perspective. The only part I like about them is the integration with the Apple ecosystem. This is a fun project and cudos to whoever pulled it off, but I fail to see the motivation.
Airpods may not be "great from an audiophile perspective", but their sound is decent and they are actually well designed headphones. They are remarkably unremarkable. They have good (the new Pros even great) ANC. Their controls are intuitive and well thought out. It's hard for me to believe that I'm promoting an Apple product here, but they are what people often claim other Apple products to be – which I found to be BS for these other products. Someone sensible actually put thought into the product.
AirPods are widely appreciated in audiophile communities. Especially with some EQ applied, which is easy and common these days and easy to find for AirPods.
They're never going to appeal to the audiophile communities that pride themselves on being different and/or expensive above all else, but they're actually good hardware with decent out of the box tuning. Apply some EQ on top if you so desire and they're very good.
I actually really like the airpod pros from an audio standpoint. I find that a lot of wireless earbuds are way too heavy on the bass compared to the airpod pro.
"Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment."
AirPods makes it easier to listen to music across multiple devices. They sound reasonable enough for people to enjoy their music. They enable people to enjoy their music. This is why they are so popular.
I am an audiophile, and for me the AirPods Pro replaced literally thousands of dollars of portable headphones, amplifiers, etc., which I don't miss a bit. Apple's audio engineering is truly top-notch, and all the convenience features are icing on the cake.
My thoughts exactly, what I’d rather have is the ability to integrate other stuff into Apple’s ecosystem (most notably my hearing aids, which despite being MFi can only really stream audio from my phone—I had a pair of Beats headphones a few years ago and the ease with which I could switch them between phone, iPad and Mac was so wonderful and I’d like to be able to do that with my HAs as well.
The sony earbuds are about the best I’ve had for sound quality and noise cancellation. Much better than AirPods, but not nearly as nice integration with the Apple ecosystem.
I find AirPods Pro 2 to be “good enough” where I gave away my set of XMs to someone who will actually use them.
Call (mic) quality in AirPods is better as well, if that matters at all to you. At least that’s what folks on the remote end of calls told me.
I got the InZone gaming buds version which are supposedly very similar to Sony's WF-1000XM5 (https://electronics.sony.com/audio/gaming-audio/all-inzone-h...) I wanted to try out the higher-end wireless Bluetooth LE Audio and their USB-C transceiver, and I wanted something that would let me side-step the Bluetooth stack on my Steam Deck (AirPods are horrible and get lag on Deck after 30 mins; that one is Apple's fault), but even in the best case I find Bluetooth on the Deck is annoying.
I would say the sound is great and overall better than AirPods Pro 3 when I compare the AirPods and InZone buds playing Spotify Lossless content from my iPhone, but the sound is not to my taste. Not sure how much of the quality comes from the LE audio vs better sound hardware engineering. They sound more detailed in vocals, mids, highs, but are a little warm and muddy in the lows. I can't get the sound profile to match my AirPod Pros 3 or my Kef bookshelf speakers with EQ, but I didn't try very hard. The left bud also sometimes takes a bit longer turn on once I put them in my ears, up to 30 seconds before it starts playing audio.
AirPod Pros 3 are ahead in noise cancelling, transparency, and touch controls -- the InZone buds use long touch vs short touch for volume up/down which is confusing, it's much easier to increase the volume and harder to decrease it. AirPods win out for convenience when using with Apple hardware also since I have to use the USB-C dongle since Apple hardware doesn't support Bluetooth LE Audio / whatever the codec is.
Overall I'm happy with the purchase -- they do a great job as Steam Deck headset use case.
I want to try out the new WF-1000XM6 as well, which seem to review better than the WF-1000XM5, but don't have any friends with them yet.
> LibrePods allows you to use AirPods features that are exclusive to Apple devices. It implements the proprietary protocol used to exchange data between AirPods and Apple devices
And then has a table listing the features.
Judging by all of the other comments that assumed otherwise, a lot of people either weren’t reading the README or weren’t parsing what it was saying.
There's very little point having a discussion about something where other people can't even be bothered to properly read the link that was submitted - and even more frustrating when that link was literally a README file.
I have only used AirPods on iPhone and didn’t realize there were special features.
Therefore like most I had zero context.
Recently, for the first time in over 15 years here, I've wished often for a "block user" function, so I can gradually weed those zero-effort zero-contributing users out. (If I didn't read HN across 4 or 5 different devices, I'd probably write a browser extension to allow me to do that...)
What happens if they’re the top or middle of a pivotal subthread?
Still, I would recommend the Sony WF-1000XM6 if you're not an Apple computer or phone user already. The UX is reportedly worse and a bit buggy, but the sound should be better.
Weird to praise Apple for the one line of devices they let you install your own operating system on and ignore that every other device doesn't.
Clearly they make it worse just because you didn't get an Apple device, so yeah idk what you're smoking but give me some.
They can. Require a valid signature from the mac's secure cryptoprocessor in order to interoperate. There's nothing we can do.
Remember when we used to use cryptography to protect ourselves from government and corporation espionage? Good times. Now cryptography is used by governments and corporations to protect themselves from us.
One day we'll need such hardware attestations to even get an internet connection.
Regarding M5 support, seems like a matter of time.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/m1n1/pull/578
So you have a total of 6 different fits to choose from. Plus the fact that there are surely dozens of third party tip options available for the Pro models.
The idea that anything with that many fit options can be considered the most uncomfortable earbuds on the market is not really possible in concept. That idea is as meaningless as saying that a size 9 Converse All Star is the most uncomfortable shoe on the market.
We are many generations removed from the original one size fits all product which was much different.
And I'm an apple hater, in general.
AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45941596 - Nov 2025 (462 comments)
https://www.android.com/quick-share/
However why support a company (by buying airpods) that is this hostile. i.e. I wouldn't be surprised to see a patch to stop this.
There is no way to do this with standard bluetooth, you have to have a custom app for it. Apple just didn't build a custom app for other platforms but there is no reason they would care about someone else investing the resources in to building it. They still win because you bought the airpods and someone else spent the resources on making the app.
1. Additional freedom for used purchasers, gifted purchasers, purchasers from a past era, whatever
The future is now.
you can grab a proprietary binary, open it up in IDA Pro (with MCP), spend some 10 minutes crafting a good prompt and after a few million (mainly input/cached) GLM 5.2 tokens you have a python script fluently speaking the proprietary protocol.
However I'm a developer and I gladly paid the $5 so I can support the original dev for all the work that they have already done, and also for open sourcing it. I really don't want to maintain my own fork, sync it, build apks etc
I have limited experience with noise canceling headphones (some circa 2008 active Sony earbuds, and some not-that-great Beats Studio Buds+. On a whim I bought AirPods 4 ANC and I’ve found them way better than I expected. Good enough for airplane noise canceling without the seal of most ear buds. They feel smaller than the beats buds, even with the stem. They seamlessly switch from my phone to iPad to Mac. I haven’t sat down to compare their quality to any of my other headphones, but I don’t really care. Nothing comes close to matching the convenience and the sound isn’t so bad that I each for something else. I did not expect to like them as much as I do.
Maybe it’s hype, maybe I don’t know what better noise canceling sounds like. These aren’t the Pros, so maybe there’s a difference.
I ask because I find Apple's wired EarPods to be less... selective than AirPods are—by that I mean they'll pick up more background noise whereas AirPods seem to only transmit my voice—but EarPods' clarity exceeds AirPods if you grab the mic and hold it next to your mouth, which you obviously can't do with AirPods.
They're never going to appeal to the audiophile communities that pride themselves on being different and/or expensive above all else, but they're actually good hardware with decent out of the box tuning. Apply some EQ on top if you so desire and they're very good.
AirPods makes it easier to listen to music across multiple devices. They sound reasonable enough for people to enjoy their music. They enable people to enjoy their music. This is why they are so popular.
What are good options for similar wireless bud headphones?
I find AirPods Pro 2 to be “good enough” where I gave away my set of XMs to someone who will actually use them.
Call (mic) quality in AirPods is better as well, if that matters at all to you. At least that’s what folks on the remote end of calls told me.
I would say the sound is great and overall better than AirPods Pro 3 when I compare the AirPods and InZone buds playing Spotify Lossless content from my iPhone, but the sound is not to my taste. Not sure how much of the quality comes from the LE audio vs better sound hardware engineering. They sound more detailed in vocals, mids, highs, but are a little warm and muddy in the lows. I can't get the sound profile to match my AirPod Pros 3 or my Kef bookshelf speakers with EQ, but I didn't try very hard. The left bud also sometimes takes a bit longer turn on once I put them in my ears, up to 30 seconds before it starts playing audio.
AirPod Pros 3 are ahead in noise cancelling, transparency, and touch controls -- the InZone buds use long touch vs short touch for volume up/down which is confusing, it's much easier to increase the volume and harder to decrease it. AirPods win out for convenience when using with Apple hardware also since I have to use the USB-C dongle since Apple hardware doesn't support Bluetooth LE Audio / whatever the codec is.
Overall I'm happy with the purchase -- they do a great job as Steam Deck headset use case.
I want to try out the new WF-1000XM6 as well, which seem to review better than the WF-1000XM5, but don't have any friends with them yet.