When designing a new bluetooth speaker, the performance of the chip was uncertain and designing a hardware-based interaction for making bluetooth connections was a challenge – identifying the optimal design depended on unknown (and, at the time, unmeasurable) performance.
At the time, when bluetooth speakers were still unfamiliar, the idea of using an App on the phone to make the connection was not obviously a good idea. But the key insight was that it would be much easier to adjust a software-based experience later in development (or even post-launch) than it would a hardware experience (based on buttons and LEDs).
