Nikheel Vishwas Savant

Software Engineer at Meta

Nikheel V Savant is a Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Automotive Systems Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience building connected devices from the OS up. He’s worked on everything from low-level firmware to high-level Android frameworks—most recently bringing smartglasses to life at Meta. Nikheel holds a Master’s in Embedded Systems from the University of Pennsylvania and loves diving deep into the weird, undocumented corners of Bluetooth. When he’s not decoding HCI logs, he’s helping developers make sense of the madness that is wireless on Android.

Wearables and Wireless: Bluetooth Internals for the Brave

Bluetooth on Android works—until it doesn’t. And nowhere is that more evident than on wearables, where power constraints, reconnection reliability, and user experience collide with a complex wireless stack. Under the hood, Android Bluetooth isn’t just a neat set of APIs—it’s a layered system of framework code, native services, HAL shims, and vendor quirks, each with its own way of failing spectacularly. In this session, we’ll take you deep into what really happens when Bluetooth “gets real” on resource-constrained, always-on devices. Drawing from real-world debugging of always-on devices and scaling them across ecosystems, we’ll cover: How the Android Bluetooth stack behaves differently on embedded wearable devices Real-world debugging tips using HCI snoop logs, bt_stack logs, and dumpsys bluetooth_manager Handling bonding loss, OOB pairing, key mismatches, and tricky security edge cases Building robust BLE and BR/EDR flows for cross-platform reliability (Android & iOS) Design patterns that isolate stack instability and minimize user-visible failures Why GATT transactions mysteriously fail, how reconnections actually work, and how to tame btsnoop_hci.log Packed with tools, tricks, and hard-won lessons, this talk is for anyone building Bluetooth-enabled wearables—or simply curious about what breaks when theory meets reality. Whether you’re a curious app developer or a brave systems engineer, you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of Android Bluetooth internals, and maybe even an appreciation for its weirdness.