Sony A7 III bluetooth connectivity - is my camera broken?

[jonas]

Hi all

I'm curious about your experience regarding bluetooth connectivity on the Sony A7 III.

The reason why I'm asking is that when I lent a Fujifilm X-T3 it would always instantly connect to my phone and start to geotag my photos. I don't think the app was running in the foreground even.

But with my A7 III I need to start the app, sometime force-quit it, turn on the camera and start the app again. The sequence is very important because if I open the app before I turn on my camera it won't work. This is very annoying because I like to geo-tag my photos all the time, but this is such a hassle that I don't.

I would like it to work as fluent as fujis system.

• I've deleted and reinstalled the app
• I've removed the connection between my phone and Sony A7III and reconnected
• I've reset the connection on my camera

Phone: iPhone Xs Max and iPhone 7
Camera: Sony A7III

 

What is your experience? Should I get my camera serviced?

 

[Lescatalpas]

Don't think so. I have an A7R3 and experience the same. I even bought a Sony phone, thinking it should work better together.  The bluetooth connection is not stable. Perhaps (I hope) this gets fixed in a future update. I believe there will be a major overhaul of the app, currently playmemories mobile. It will become Imaging Edge mobile.

Edited February 27, 2019 by Lescatalpas

[jonas]

Thanks @Lescatalpas I've looked into those apps now.

I'll truly hope that this new app will result in the same experience as Fuji's, because that was indeed seamless and worked almost instant.

[ozgreg]

*sighs*

Yes the Sony App is pretty poor (and the ratings in the Marketplace echo this).  You can get the app to exchange GPS fairly reliably on the later Android OS versions (Not sure about IOS).. 

The trick (once you get the damn app to perform the initial setup which is problematic as well) for Android users is to make sure that the Sony Play Memories app is set to not being Battery Optimised then when you turn on the camera, manually wake your phone (for me I double tap on the screen) and the app will exchange GPS information and you can see the map icon light up in a few seconds..

This seems to only work if the phone also has a cellular network connection..  I don't know WHY Sony would need a cellular network when you can let the OS do this but I can only hope who ever is working on the new Sony app has a better basic understanding of app development (or better still they outsource it to a developer who has experience)!

I hope this helps, I got it mostly working now..

[Chrissie]

52 minutes ago, ozgreg said:

I don't know WHY Sony would need a cellular network

Because they want to syphon off a copy of your private data. That's why. From the end user's point of view this may be considered a bug, while from Sony's perspective it's the whole point in offering this "free" service.

For those of you who haven't read Sony's Online "privacy" policy: you can still do so at any time here.

I particularly liked the following sentence:

Quote

If you wish to stop automatic data collection, you should cease using / uninstall the application.