IOS – After enabling iOS COVID exposure notifications, why was I not prompted to enable Bluetooth

bluetoothiosiphonenotifications

After enabling COVID exposure notifications on my iPhone, I was not prompted to enable Bluetooth which was turned off in the control center at the time. I thought Bluetooth need to be on for this service to work.

If I turn off Bluetooth, will this service stop working?

iPhone 11
iOS 14.2

This is about the new exposure notification service that does not require a separate app to work (like it did previously). These are the "exposure notifications" built into iOS that were not available prior to iOS 14.

Best Answer

I would go back to basics. How are you disabling Bluetooth? The radio is active for system services in almost all cases and I would expect enabling COVID 19 exposure notifications implies that each device hardware listens and broadcasts on a separate hardware channel than any other Bluetooth emanation or pairing.

Both Google and Apple have the same design document up and someone with a Bluetooth sniffer could validate this as well.