The latest software update to 4.3 (T889UVUCMK7) seems to make the Note II subject to bug #67272 (https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=67272). This means that once the phone has encountered (e.g. in a car stopped next to you, in a mall, etc; no pairing is necessary) more than 1990 different Bluetooth devices, the Bluetooth service is crashing and restarting whenever a new Bluetooth device is nearby. Often this is accompanied by repeated "Unfortunately, Bluetooth Share has Stopped" error messages. This makes Bluetooth unusable, lets the phone get rather hot, and the battery drains quickly. It took me about 2 months after updating my Note II to 4.3 to reach this state.
As far as I can tell, this can only be fixed by either doing a factory reset, or by rooting the phone and manually editing the xml file that triggers the bug. Neither is a permanent solution because the bug will reoccur whenever 1990 Bluetooth devices have been encountered. There's an app (BLE Crash Resolver) that tries to circumvent this problem, but it doesn't seem to work on the Note II.
This is a serious issue in the latest update available for the Note II. What are the plans to fix this for T-mobile's Note II users? On what timescale?
Until a fix becomes available, is it possible to downgrade the Note II back to an earlier OS version that doesn't suffer from this bug?
Thanks!