AB Remote

Coming from the Phonak app to this is just disappointing, which caught me way off guard. Especially since AB and Phonak are part of Sonova. The UI is painful to use - I can say as an engineer I could have built something better in a weekend. For example to adjust the progressive level on my daughter’s CI requires me to go to device check? That makes no sense. Who decided to bury it in that menu? Another, and by far the biggest, strike is that you can’t pair more than one device pair. My daughter has a CI and a HA, if we want to switch to her backup CI for swimming we have to unpair her CI and HA, pair the backup, switch it to swim mode (buried in another confusing menu, BTW). And when she’s done swimming we get to repeat the whole process again. To be honest I didn’t want to write this review as the technology behind these devices is fantastic. But when your primary way of controlling a child’s device (obviously we have the buttons disabled) is the app then there’s a high level of expectation. Maybe it’s time to get the Phonak and AB iOS devs together for a workshop.

It’s great to use for watching videos or music. It isn’t that bad, but I do wish it’d save your volume preferences. The volume would be way too high and quite literally jumpscare me. I just circumvent it by playing music and set phone volume to 0 to adjust accordingly to a comfortable CI volume for bluetooth, but it really is a pain to have a default volume that’s too loud for myself and my brain, personally. The HUGE issue would be that it doesn’t keep the same setting for phone calls even after changing it. It jumps back to default volume (which would be so loud for myself) and if I try to change it, it just sits at ‘connecting’ and the slider would never show up. So phone calls are already rendered useless. It’s a great app but please add something to keep a preferred volume everytime I connect and do something about the phone calls.

It's a great app, only a few small issues. One is when I leave my phone on the same bluetooth volume it was yesterday, sometimes when I put it to 0 volume I can still hear the video/game. I'm not sure if this is an issue for other bluetooth devices, it's just been doing that. Another issue is that the AB only connects to my right cochlear implant. Doesn't work for my left, it's weird. I've tried connecting both of it using the AB app, but it only works with the right.