feat: auto-reconnect peripherals that drop while held on this Mac#36
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Apple's Magic peripherals sometimes fail to reconnect after the Bluetooth radio sleeps (e.g. a lid-close) and stay stuck until they're physically powered off and on — a macOS-side bug we can't fix, but can recover from. A persistent watcher now retries a peripheral that drops while it should be on this Mac until it's back in range (or a 1h window expires), so the user no longer has to manually reconnect after flipping the device off and on. - Armed on a genuine disconnect (handlePeripheralDisconnected) and, on wake, for everything this Mac was connected to right before sleep (connectedBeforeSleep) -- not just the peripherals we actively handed off -- so a device that dropped on a peerless lid-close is covered too. Deliberate releases (handoff, "Remove from PC", sleep) are flagged so they never arm it. - Each probe is a cheap RSSI read; only once the device is visible again does it consult the peer with a read-only HOLDS_ONE query and reclaim it unless the peer is actively using it. It never tells the peer to disconnect, so an in-use peripheral on the other Mac is never stolen. - Watcher retries pair silently; the "Pairing Timed Out" notification stays reserved for interactive connects. - Gated by a default-on "Reconnect peripherals if they drop" toggle in Settings -> Other.
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🎉 This PR is included in version 2.11.0 🎉 The release is available on GitHub release Your semantic-release bot 📦🚀 |
This was referenced Jun 3, 2026
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What & why
Apple's Magic peripherals sometimes fail to reconnect after the Bluetooth radio sleeps (a lid-close, say) and stay stuck until they're physically powered off and on — a macOS-side bug we can't fix, but can recover from. Today the only reconnect attempt is a single shot on wake, so if the device is still stuck at that moment nothing brings it back and the user has to reconnect by hand after power-cycling it.
This adds a persistent auto-reconnect watcher: a peripheral that drops while it should be on this Mac is retried until it's back in range (or a 1 h window expires), so reconnection just happens once the device reappears.
How it works
handlePeripheralDisconnected) and, on wake, for everything this Mac was connected to right before sleep (connectedBeforeSleep) — not just the peripherals we actively handed off — so a device that dropped on a lid-close with no peer to take it is covered too. Deliberate releases (handoff, "Remove from PC", sleep) are flagged so they never arm it.HOLDS_ONEquery confirms the peer isn't using it (peer "yes" → leave it; "no" or unreachable → take it). It never tells the peer to disconnect, so an in-use peripheral on the other Mac is never stolen.isConnected()check means a device macOS reconnected on its own is dropped from the watchlist rather than needlessly re-paired.Safety
Two independent gates keep it from grabbing a peripheral the other Mac is actively using: the RSSI visibility gate (a peripheral connected to the peer isn't advertising → invisible to us → never attempted), and the 5 s wake delay plus
HOLDS_ONE's own 5 s connect window, which absorb Wi-Fi reassociation lag on wake.Testing
Builds clean (
CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO);swift formatapplied. No test target in this project. The sleep/wake/power-cycle recovery and the RSSI "is it back?" timing want a real two-Mac + Magic-device check — IOBluetooth sleep behavior can't be exercised locally.