I’ve been struggling for weeks with a very annoying issue on my smartphone, and I just now found the solution. It was quite the journey, and very very frustrating knowing that people usually come to ME for solutions to problems like this, so if I was having a problem myself, I knew I had to keep at it until I figured out the solution.

The Problem: My smartphone would pause every 5 minutes whenever I had a Bluetooth speaker connected. I could be in the car connected to my car’s Bluetooth or walking with my Bluetooth earbuds on and whether I was on YouTube watching a video, on Plex watching a TV Show or movie, or listening to an audiobook on Audible, it would pause every 5 minutes like clockwork.

I checked all of the obvious things first, of course: Sleeping apps, battery saver settings, etc., and after turning all of them off completely, for every app, the problem remained, so I took to the web. I found several articles with lists of possible solutions, many of them listing the same solutions. I tried them all. Still the same issue remained. Day after day, week after week, driving me crazy. It’s really really annoying, especially when I was listening to a particularly good book or watching a video or movie I was really interested in. Each interruption prompted me to dig deeper and keep looking for a solution.

I even went so far as preparing to wipe my phone completely and start over fresh. I knew this might resolve the issue, but it would probably leave me still wondering what caused the issue in the first place, and I might be stuck wondering if the problem will just come back again, possibly even right after the refresh, to make me even more frustrated and annoyed. Not to mention the time I would have wasted setting everything up just the way I like it., not knowing if something within my particular setup was what was causing the issue in the first place.

With the reset in mind, I also began looking at just upgrading to a new smartphone in the process. Why not get some better speed and features along the way. Maybe the issue I’m having has something to do with this model of smartphone (Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G), who knows? After some research the Google Pixel 6 Pro looked pretty sweet – the pure Android experience without all the Samsung crap, including the Samsung Store and all of the bloatware they include on their phones (which I remove as much of as I can), and it also comes in a 512GB model, which is a new standard I live by. It’s a fairly rare storage size for a smartphone, but it’s the only size I’ll buy anymore after experiencing my last couple smartphones with this much storage. It’s worth the extra money for all the extra breathing room it provides.

So with the problem still ever-present, yesterday I started focusing more on the significance of the exact 5-minute intervals of the pauses. Why 5 minutes exactly? Something has to be happening that’s triggering that pause, and it has to be something that uses Bluetooth. Then it hit me: My Dexcom G6 Blood Glucose patch is connected with Bluetooth and it sends a reading every 5 minutes!! BINGO, I thought, that HAS to be the issue. Now I had to think of what I need to do next to confirm this theory, as well as what I would have to do if this was the issue. Will I need to get a different model of glucose patch? Is there an update for the Dexcom G6 application that I need to install? What about my smartwatch? I was using the Dexcom watchface that comes with the Dexcom G6 as my smartwatch’s display, so this way I can see me readings at any time by pressing my smartwatch’s screen. I get a nice graph of my reading history as well as my current glucose level. Using that watchface, I realized that, itself, could be the issue – the watchface needs to update every 5 minutes after my phone gets a new reading from my patch, all via Bluetooth. So I turned off that watchface immediately and tested it. Fail. The problem remained.

There is no easy way to stop or pause the Dexcom G6 without replacing some hardware – either the transmitter or the sensor – so doing that would cost some money, and I’m not even actually sure that’s the issue. So I took to the Internet again, this time specifying “Dexcom” in my search term along with “Android bluetooth 5 minutes pause”. I quickly found a few posts on Reddit that insisted that they had the same issue, definitely from the Dexcom G6, and asking how they could fix it, if there was a patch for the software, etc… Then, after some back and forth discussion, someone else responded stating they thought they had the same issue with their Dexcom device, but it was actually the Roku app. The user said “just uninstall the Roku app and your issue will be done.” Then, after that post were several more from other users saying “Thank you, that worked!” in various ways, confirming that just having the Roku app installed, which should have nothing to do at all with Bluetooth, was causing the issue. It sounded pretty sketchy to me, but I figured it was simpler than everything else I was about to try – just uninstall the Roku app, and if that didn’t solve the issue, just re-install it.

I uninstalled the Roku app then started playing an audiobook as I drove home from work, most expecting to find out, in about 5 minutes, that those people were wrong–at least in MY case–and it wasn’t the Roku app. But they were spot-on. I made it all the way home, and listened to my audiobook all the way, about 40 minutes straight, with no pauses at all. The Roku app somehow causes this issue. I haven’t looked into it further yet, but I certainly will later on.

Right now I’m just so relieved my issue is completely gone now, and I don’t have to wipe it, replace it, or waste any more time troubleshooting. The only benefit I got from this whole experience was that I’m now sure I will definitely be abandoning Samsung phones, at least for one upgrade cycle. They stopping making their “Note” line of phones with the Note 20 (the one I have) being the last of the Notes–these are their phone model with the built-in stylus so you can write and draw on the screen with a pencil-like stylus. That’s a big feature I really liked in my phone, along with the 512GB of storage. So without that option in the new models, I compared all of the other pluses and minuses and I’m pretty sure the Pixel 6 Pro will be my next smartphone, hands-down. I am well aware that they will still sell a stylus that will work with their new phone models, but it won’t be built-in and there just won’t be that seamless integration that the Note series has always had. And I know I can also use a stylus with the Pixel 6 Pro, if I wanted to, so there are alternatives for that piece of the puzzle.

I also learned, during this fiasco, that you shouldn’t summarily reject someone’s response to a post offering an alternative solution to a problem, no matter how silly it might sound. It might just be true, as it was in this case. I never would have found the solution without finding that post, or one similar to it (I have actually found several now). I have over 500 apps installed on my phone, and the Roku app would definitely have been one of the last, if not THE last app I would have suspected as having caused this issue.

First World problem.