As an aside: I saw a thread on this forum referenced by this article: Google is bringing native hearing aid support to Android | VentureBeat.
Well…poop. I quite like the idea of truly hands free. I guess we’ll see how long Phonak keeps that going. Maybe they’ll strike their own path.
I’ve been trawling through the various tech news sites. Some are saying low-latency, others are saying high quality audio at the expense of latency. It’s a pretty important difference. Obviously a comprehension problem on my part, so can someone help me out?
I was hoping for an official Bluetooth SIG standard. This doesn’t appear to be it.
“expense of latency” First paragraph of this tech doc:
https://source.android.com/devices/bluetooth/asha
Hearing Aid Audio Support Using Bluetooth LE
Hearing aid devices (HA) can have improved accessibility on Android-powered mobile devices by using connection-oriented L2CAP channels (COC) over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). COC uses an elastic buffer of several audio packets to maintain a steady flow of audio, even in the presence of packet loss. This buffer provides audio quality for hearing aid devices at the expense of latency.
next paragraph ->
The design of COC references the Bluetooth Core Specification Version 5 (BT). To stay aligned with the core specifications, all multi-byte values on this page should be read as little-endian.
Click that “Bluetooth Coore Specifications Version 5” link and it takes you to the Bluetooth specs page and mentions the Bluetooth SIG Working Group. That page appears to be the work of the SIG, and it appears to me that it is using the official BT SIG standard.
I’ve been going through that page most of the day, using Google searches trying to understand it as thoroughly as I can. Like you, that “high quality audio at the expense of latency” is not clear to me what that means in terms of streaming voice or audio.
I’m thinking it means that if you have good/interference-free communications between your cellphone and your hearing aids then you will have high-quality-audio and low-latency and everything will be peachy.
But if you have too much interference, or if the hearing aid processor is too busy then the elastic buffer can provide some extra slack to attempt to maintain the state of high-quality-audio and low-latency. If communications problems persist to the extent the elastic buffer is full, then latency has to suffer in order to not drop the connection completely.
That makes sense, I see that now as well. It helps when someone else points something out with their thoughts, thanks.
That would be part of the reason for the increased processing power of the Quattro in the announcement of 100% more speed and 100% more memory.
That’s some pretty good reasoning @pvc and @teejayess.
I’m not sure of what’s really happened here. Has Google done an Apple and created their own standard? At least it’s ‘open’ I guess, so others can play. So here’s Google, who are one of the handful of organisations at the top level of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The Bluetooth SIG has a Hearing Aid Working Group who are supposed to be working hard to come up with an official hearing aid profile. Google seems to have bypassed that entirely and done a deal with one hearing aid manufacturer. Where does that leave the Hearing Aid Working Group? Are we going to have two competing non-official standards? Do hearing aid companies need to take sides?
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DejaVu, the Betamax/VCR wars? Who knows? 
Maybe the hearing aid Firmware could support both communications protocols (Android and MFi or newer MFi). However if one protocol has superior performance over the other, then that’s bad news for the other.
Oh, I don’t think it’s just one manufacturer. GN is likely just the first in announcing it.
I’m sure you’re right but they did all the development with GN. Maybe they just got sick of nothing happening through the working party and decided to use their muscle.
This is an open Bluetooth compliant protocol. It can be used by any HA manufacturer or Android phone manufacturer.
Bluetooth has it’s own radio to manage the Bluetooth stack. This partnership was just the initial collaboration to get it started, but it is not a closed source like Apple MFI.
Here is more in a more layman frriendly explanation:
This cleared most of the mud for me:
ASHA is designed to have a minimal impact on battery life with low-latency while maintaining a high quality audio experience for users who rely on hearing aids. We look forward to continually evolving the spec to even better meet the needs of our users.
The spec details the pairing and connectivity, network topology, system architecture, and system requirements for implementing hearing aids using low energy connection-oriented channels. Any hearing aid manufacturer can now build native hearing aid support for Android.
There are still many unanswered questions,that will get answered in the next few months.
Here is another write up that helps to explain more clearly.
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Thanks. Makes clear that we really don’t have a lot of info yet! 
You’d think they could tell what phone specs it needed. It seems like it needs Android 9. If so, it would limit to pretty recent phones, but then somewhere said Bluetooth 4.2 was ok which could make a lot of phones potentials. Will have to wait to see what shakes out.
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The Google code people saw (and reposted) showed it was part of Android 9 Pie. What’ll be more interesting was other related HA code showed it only activated on the Pixel phones. Like others said…we’ll have to wait and see.
That’s too bad. Given that they’re starting fresh, it seems possible to add a third microphone to one of the aids, dedicated to BT phone calls. The microphone would be attached to the RIC wire, and it would hang down so as to pick up your voice, like on regular BT earpieces. They could work out the cosmetics so it looks like you’re wearing a BT earpiece.
Just some historical context. From 2014:
A couple of quotes:
“It is important that we connect to and serve all kinds of smartphones and multimedia sound signals,” says EHIMA secretary general, Soren Hougaard. “In order to achieve that, we must define a standard everyone can implement. We want to avoid the situation that occurred in the market for videotapes in the 1980s where customers had to choose among 3-5 tape formats and corresponding VCRs. That was a nightmare!”
and
Several use cases will be supported, including calling with a mobile phone, enjoying stereo audio from multi-media devices (music players, radio, television, etc.) and receiving broadcast audio information from public address and announcement systems.
Phones are one thing. How about HA’s?! Is it likely if I go out to Costco and buy a ReSound Forte HA (ReSound is a GN Hearing subsidiary) that 6 months or so from now, there might be a firmware upgrade enabling a current model hearing aid to stream BT on an Android Phone, needing no streamer device? I have a Galaxy Note 8 and Samsung typically provides two Android upgrades (just got Oreo, v8.0, this April, and am expecting to get 9.0, Android Pie, in typical Samsung fashion, 5 to 6 months from now. I guess it will sell a lot of newer HA’s if only newer models ever get “MFA” firmware but here’s hoping. Sorry if I missed something, being pretty ignorant about how the HA market works so far. Did “MFI” require complete new HA’s all around or were any HA’s retrogradely brought into the future there?
To try to answer my own question, the following snippet out of the Minneapolis edition of BizJournal suggests that I’m out of luck. The “MadeForAndroid” is already going to be in the new ReSound Linx Quattro and the Beltone Amaze (too bad for other older models, I guess) but will only appear in A FUTURE VERSION OF ANDROID. Since Android Pie is officially out for Pixel and Essential Android phone users (although not for other OEM versions of Android) that might imply Android users will have to wait a while for MFA functionality in a worst case scenario.
https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2018/08/16/gn-hearing-teams-with-google-on-android-streaming.html (if a subscribe pop-up appears, just click “Not This Time”)
By the way, essential phone is on fire sale again for $224
Was short lived! Up to over $300 when I checked.