Czech Bluetooth Tech Among TIME's Best Inventions 2025

When TIME Magazine selected Evenflo’s Revolve180 LiteMax NXT as one of its Best Inventions of 2025, it wasn’t just a win for the American baby products giant. It was recognition for a team of Czech developers who spent years perfecting the invisible layer that makes the product smart — the mobile app and its Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity.

From pairing pain to frictionless connection

Anyone who has struggled with Bluetooth pairing knows the frustration. Now imagine that frustration multiplied by a sleep-deprived parent trying to set up a smart car seat at 2 AM. The Evenflo team knew that if the BLE connection wasn’t seamless, the entire smart feature set would fail — not technically, but in terms of user adoption. Our challenge was clear: make Bluetooth pairing invisible. The initial setup should be the last time a parent thinks about connectivity. After that, the app should auto-connect to the car seat every time, across both iOS and Android, without any manual intervention.

A custom BLE metadata matcher

The core of our solution was designing a custom BLE metadata matcher. When a phone scans for nearby Bluetooth devices, it receives advertising packets — small chunks of data that devices broadcast to announce their presence. We built a system that processes these advertising packets, cross-references them with backend data, and identifies which devices belong to which family. On Android, we could leverage stable MAC address access for reliable device identification. iOS, however, required a completely different approach due to Apple’s privacy-first architecture that randomizes device identifiers. We designed a fallback mechanism using service UUIDs and manufacturer-specific data fields to achieve the same reliability.

What we achieved

• Multi-user access per family — multiple caregivers can connect to the same car seat without re-pairing
• Reliable auto-connect across both iOS and Android platforms
• Zero manual pairing required for family members after initial setup

Cross-platform BLE state synchronization

Getting Bluetooth to work reliably on one platform is challenging enough. Making it work consistently across iOS, Android, and a cloud backend simultaneously required rethinking our entire synchronization architecture. We rebuilt the Bluetooth service layers from scratch, implementing separate strategies for each platform while maintaining a unified domain model. Apple’s stricter privacy standards meant we couldn’t share the same device identifiers between platforms — so the backend became the single source of truth, correlating device tokens and user accounts regardless of which platform initiated the connection.

Technical requirements we solved

• Asynchronous BLE scanning with intelligent metadata caching to reduce battery drain
• Backend correlation and device token matching across platform boundaries
• Secure binding between device UUIDs and user accounts with proper encryption
• Fail-safe reconnection logic that handles connection drops gracefully without user intervention

Working with Evenflo is the perfect combination of technical challenge and meaningful product for us. Developing an app that helps parents keep their children safe motivated us to go deeper — both in UX and in the technology itself.

— Martin Homolka, Co-founder, Cookielab

The tech stack behind the magic

The app runs natively on both iOS and Android. On the Android side, we used Kotlin with Coroutines for async BLE operations, WorkManager for background tasks, and a clean architecture with Koin for dependency injection. Communication with the backend uses GraphQL with Protobuf for efficient binary serialization — critical when you’re dealing with real-time sensor data from a car seat. Authentication flows through OAuth with Firebase, and local data persistence uses DataStore for type-safe, async data storage.

// Simplified BLE auto-connect flow
suspend fun autoConnect(familyId: String) {
    val knownDevices = repository.getDevicesForFamily(familyId)
    val scanner = BleScanner(filters = knownDevices.toBleFilters())

    scanner.startScan()
        .filter { it.matchesMetadata(knownDevices) }
        .first()
        .let { device ->
            connectionManager.connect(device)
            syncManager.synchronizeState(device, familyId)
        }
}

American hardware. Czech software. Global impact.

The Evenflo partnership is now in its seventh year. What started as a mobile app project evolved into a deep technology partnership that spans continents — with hardware teams in the US and China, and our software team in Prague. When you see the TIME Best Inventions badge on the Revolve180, know that behind the elegant hardware is Czech-built software solving one of BLE’s hardest problems: making Bluetooth so reliable that parents never have to think about it.