Your Android phone is downgrading your Bluetooth headphones, and one developer setting fixes it

I spent a lot of money on a pair of Nothing Headphone (1), and then let my Google Pixel 10 Pro quietly throttle them for months without knowing. That is the frustrating part about Bluetooth audio on Android. You buy good hardware, you pair it, music plays, and everything sounds fine, so you assume the phone is doing its best. It usually is not. Somewhere in the handshake between my Pixel and my Nothing, Android decided a lower-quality codec was good enough, and it never bothered to ask me.