I tried connecting the phone to the laptop using bluetoothctl: same outcome (it fails).
The laptop (kermit) is still considered a paired device:
[bluetooth]# devices Paired
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx kermit
Attempting to connect to it yields the following error message after a while:
[bluetooth]# Failed to connect: org.bluez.Error.Failed le-connection-abort-by-local
'journal' doesn't seem to contain any further information.
.
. That means that your app will not work at all in this version unless some system fiddling is done by the user.