Bluetooth Is Everywhere—But Most Devices Are Stuck in Time
Bluetooth powers industrial sensors, asset trackers, medical devices, and countless other IoT applications. Every year, billions of Bluetooth-enabled devices are deployed across industries—tracking shipments, monitoring machines, ensuring worker safety. Unlike Wi-Fi or cellular IoT devices, Bluetooth devices lack direct internet access. Managing them at scale is a different kind of challenge. It means dealing with hardware, embedded software, cloud infrastructure, and then adding even more complexity with mobile apps and/or gateways to bridge devices to the internet. Each of these layers comes with its own set of challenges, requiring dedicated engineering effort, security considerations, and maintenance over time. And yet, the IoT platform industry has largely ignored this reality, assuming that most devices are just online by default.
That leaves OEMs and product teams stuck. Most IoT platforms don’t support Bluetooth natively, so companies are forced to figure out device management on their own.
I’ve been in IoT for almost a decade, and I’ve seen this pattern play out over and over again. A company builds a Bluetooth-enabled product, ships it, and then realizes too late that they have no way to update or manage their devices. Whether it’s industrial sensors, smart tags, or medical devices, most Bluetooth devices are frozen in time as soon as they leave the factory.
Managing Bluetooth Devices is Harder Than It Looks
Bluetooth-enabled IoT devices don’t just work on their own (nor does software in general). If you want a scalable, reliable fleet of devices in the field, you need a full system in place. That means building:
- Firmware for the Bluetooth device—handling connectivity, security, and data transmission
- Custom software for the gateway (or mobile app)—ensuring stable Bluetooth connections, data forwarding, and firmware updates
- A cloud backend—storing device data, tracking versions, and managing updates
- Monitoring and fleet management tools—to see which devices are online, push updates, and troubleshoot failures at scale
This all has to be built on top of making the device do its actual job—whether that’s asset tracking, industrial monitoring, or smart sensing.
Most companies aren’t equipped to do this from scratch. It takes years of engineering effort, and if they get it wrong, their devices become pinned to a v1 software version—unable to update to resolve to security issues, get performance optimizations, or any feature improvements.
This is Kind of a Big Deal
Shipping Bluetooth devices without a management plan is a long-term liability. I’ve seen too many companies deploy devices without a way to monitor, update, or fix them remotely, turning what could have been a long-lasting, reliable product into instant technical debt.
Software has bugs. Security flaws emerge. Once an un-OTA-able Bluetooth device is out in the field, there’s no undo button. If a security vulnerability is found and there’s no update mechanism, that vulnerability stays open indefinitely. Attackers can intercept connections, steal data, or worse—compromise an entire fleet of devices. Security standards keep evolving, and if your devices can’t keep up, you’ll eventually be forced to end-of-life them.
Bluetooth devices aren’t just security risks without updates—they also degrade over time. Firmware updates keep them running efficiently, extending battery life, improving connectivity, and reducing failures. Without them, devices start failing faster than expected. That temperature sensor in a warehouse? It might start missing data. A tracking beacon? Could disconnect randomly. Instead of a software fix, businesses end up replacing hardware that should have lasted years.
Without updates, Bluetooth devices hit a dead end. Security risks grow, performance degrades, and at some point, businesses have to decide: keep using outdated, unreliable hardware or replace it. Most don’t take the risk—they swap devices out. That means perfectly good hardware ends up in landfills just because there was no way to keep it updated.
In 2022, the world produced 62 million metric tons of e-waste—growing five times faster than actual recycling efforts (UNITAR).
The Industry Needs to Do Better
Bluetooth is a massive part of IoT, yet many Bluetooth devices are still deployed without a real management strategy. This needs to change.
Device makers need to plan beyond launch, ensuring long-term support and updates are built into the product from the start. IoT platforms can’t keep ignoring Bluetooth. The industry needs real solutions for updates, security, and fleet management—especially for non-IP connected devices.
At Golioth, we’re aiming to solve this by making Bluetooth devices as manageable as any other connected device. That’s why we built Bluetooth-to-Cloud connectivity as a first-class feature—giving developers real-time monitoring, secure updates, and seamless cloud integration. Because if we don’t solve this problem now, the problem of unmanaged Bluetooth devices will only get worse.
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