Is watchOS 27 Killing This Classic Apple Watch App?
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The Apple Watch appears to be getting short shrift in this year’s OS 27 updates, with watchOS 27 adding little more than “New Siri” and a few other modest improvements. However, the update is arguably taking away more than it gives.
In addition to marking the end of the update line for every Apple Watch released before 2023, Apple may also be retiring a longstanding wearable communications app.
As MacRumors noted earlier today — and as we’ve also confirmed — the Walkie-Talkie app is conspicuously missing from the first watchOS 27 developer beta released on Monday.
While it’s possible this could simply be an early beta gaffe, we’re not betting on it. It’s fairly rare for established apps to simply vanish, and Walkie-Talkie hasn’t just disappeared from the app grid — it’s also missing from the Control Center.
Apple hasn’t said anything about Walkie-Talkie going away, but it rarely does, and that’s even more true for an app like this, which feels like someone’s special project that never got much love after its initial introduction — from Apple’s software engineers and users alike.
Walkie-Talkie has actually been around since 2018, when it was highlighted as a key feature in watchOS 5, but we won’t blame you if you’ve forgotten it was ever there.
In what undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time, Apple VP Kevin Lynch unveiled Walkie-Talkie as “an entirely new way to communicate that’s real-time voice with the spontaneity of short messaging.” As the name implied, the system allowed push-to-talk voice communications between two Apple Watches, but unlike the old radio gear, it worked whether the other participant was in the next room or on the next continent since it ran over the Apple Watch’s internet connection.
Walkie-Talkie users had to set up an initial link with someone by sending a request and having the other person approve it. However, once that was done, the other person could break in almost any time. The only way to prevent unwanted interruptions was to turn your availability off or remove the person as a contact entirely if you no longer wanted to hear from them at all.
It’s unclear how many people used Walkie-Talkie over the years, but it wouldn’t be surprising to find that even those who set it up initially left availability off more often than not, effectively negating the “spontaneity” of the feature. Other communication channels like text messaging were far less invasive, and of course phone calls and FaceTime Audio calls remained an option for those who wanted to chat.
A serious privacy bug in 2019 that allowed the Walkie-Talkie app to turn someone else’s Apple Watch into a listening device likely didn’t help much either. Apple quickly fixed this with a watchOS 5.3 update, but it may have left many folks reluctant to turn the feature back on.
In the years since, Apple has kept the feature’s documentation reasonably up to date, but that’s not too hard since almost nothing has changed. The Walkie-Talkie feature was never explicitly mentioned by Apple again, and by 2021 it seemed Apple had moved on to a new Intercom feature that worked so similarly in concept to Walkie-Talkie that we were genuinely surprised Apple hadn’t integrated the features.
Granted, Intercom was primarily for HomePods, but Apple tied it into the iPhone and the Apple Watch — as a separate function in the Home app. That alone should have sounded the death knell for Walkie-Talkie, but Apple seemed content to leave the feature on life support for a few more years.
While rumors of its death still may be premature — this is still the first developer beta — we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has finally decided Walkie-Talkie isn’t coming out of its coma and pulled the plug entirely.
