I've spent close to a day trying to connect a classic bluetooth (non-BLE) ELM327 OBD dongle until I realized its not connecting properly only with my GrapheneOS phone. Trying on different other phones the bluetooth connection works like a charm.
On GrapheneOS, pairing works but connecting from whatever app I try it with won't work. The only way I got it to connect was by unpairing, then pairing when asked while connection attempt. Then this one connect works, but any successive connect attempts will fail. Restarting / power-cycling phone or BT device has no effect, I can then only reconnect by unpairing first. Additionally this workaround only works on one app I used for testing, not the app I want to actually use.

My phone is on latest GraphenOS 2024030800

Are there any privacy related options that might be interfering here? Any other ideas?

@ErnestThornhill thanks for the pointer. Don't think its coincidential . Obviously, the thread hasn't been there when I first looked for known issues...