Web-Bluetooth error "GATT operation not authorized" occurs on Windows only

Question

I have been working with web-bluetooth for the past several months on iOS and ChromeOS without any problems. But today, I tried to run some of my examples on Windows for the first time, and to my surprise, most of the things I had implemented didn't work with Windows. I am able to successfully connect to my peripheral, but whenever I try reading or writing anything to a custom service with a custom characteristic, I get the error "GATT operation not authorized". I have tried looking around but there is no information anywhere about this.

I am including below the simplest example I have which is just for turning the LEDs on / off on an nrf52832 board. There is only one custom service and one custom characteristic implemented, the value of which controls the states of the LEDs. This works without any problems on Chromebooks and Macs but does not work on Windows. Here is the link to this simple project including the embedded code and the web-app. https://github.com/shtarbanov/WebBluetooth-Feather-nRF52832/tree/master/LED%20Control

I have made two implementations of the same thing, one based on promises and another based on async-await located in the folders "WebApp (Async)" and "WebApp (Promises)", respectively. Both of those implementations work fine on Mac and Cromebook, but not on Windows.

Answer 1

It is a known issue that secure characteristics are not accessible using Web Bluetooth on Windows. On other platforms the pairing occurs automatically, but not on Windows. There is an issue tracking this:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=960258