The transmission quality of Bluetooth audio has made significant progress in the past few years, especially when major mobile phone manufacturers began to cancel the headphone jack one after another, and the development speed of Bluetooth audio has accelerated a lot. Now you can also listen losslessly with bluetooth.

When it comes to audio codecs, SBC and AAC are widely used in the market, as well as Qualcomm-led aptX and aptX HD, as well as Apple’s ALAC and Sony’s LDAC.

Considering Qualcomm’s current position and share in the Android mobile phone market, as well as the deep binding of aptX and aptX HD with Qualcomm chips, these two codec formats are increasingly used.

Whether a standard can be widely used depends not only on the standard itself being good enough, but also on the fact that the cost of adopting this standard should be low enough, or even free. A recent move by Qualcomm that lays the groundwork for the wider use of the aptX codec is open source.

Android expert Mishaal Rahman found that in November last year, Qualcomm engineers submitted code to AOSP, and the submission showed that Qualcomm added the source code of aptX and aptX HD encoders to AOSP.

In a follow-up inquiry, Qualcomm confirmed that Android OEMs no longer need to pay them a license fee to obtain the aptX and aptX HD encoders, which are now part of the AOSP Apache license and free for anyone to use.

We made the decision a few months ago to include the classic aptX and aptX HD encoders in AOSP. We’ve been working closely with Google and individual OEMs over the years to incorporate these codecs into Android-based products. We are happy to say that these encoders are indeed now available under the existing Contributor License Agreement under AOSP, licensed by Qualcomm.

According to the data, Android device manufacturers who want to use Qualcomm’s aptX and aptX HD need to pay a one-time authorization fee of up to $6,000, and also need to pay for each device sold. It may be precisely because of the licensing fee that even the new Samsung Galaxy S23 this year only supports the basic aptX, not the higher aptX HD.

However, Qualcomm also clearly pointed out that the only aptX products included in AOSP areEncoderand the device manufacturers at the receiving end of Bluetooth headsets still need to usedecoderPay authorization and license fees. In addition, more advanced aptX versions, such as aptX Adaptive and lower latency versions of aptX are not included.

The project is hosted on the Google platform at the following address: