Where Will the AirPods Pro’s New Hearing Health Features Be Available?
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One of the most significant health announcements from Apple’s Glowtime event will come to fruition when iOS 18.1 lands next week. Along with a firmware update to the second-generation AirPods Pro, it will be possible to use Apple’s flagship earbuds to assist with your hearing in several new and exciting ways.
After unveiling the new AirPods 4, Apple announced that the existing AirPods Pro would soon be able to test your hearing, protect your hearing, and assist with your hearing. Apple gained approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shortly after the event. However, the company planned to launch the feature in over 100 countries where authorization from health regulators is also necessary, and it probably had other work to do. Hence, the feature wasn’t there when iOS 18.0 launched a few days later.
However, several media outlets, including TechCrunch, The Verge, and The Wall Street Journal (Apple News+), reported on the new hearing health features yesterday, sharing that Apple will roll them out next week in iOS 18.1.
What’s less certain is how widespread this rollout will be. Although Apple promised its new hearing health features would be available in “100+ countries and regions,” it didn’t say every country on its list would receive all of them.
There are three distinct features involved here:
- Hearing Test performs a scientifically validated hearing test.
- Hearing Aid turns the AirPods Pro into clinical-grade hearing aids.
- Hearing Protection filters out loud environmental noises.
All three are showing up in the iOS 18.1 RC. However, they’ll require an accompanying firmware update to be fully functional. That’s listed as 7B19, up from the current 7A305. Developers willing to jump through a few hoops should be able to get it now, but everyone else will need to wait until next week’s public iOS 18.1 release.
However, Apple has made it clear in the iOS 18.1 release notes that Hearing Protection will only be available in the United States and Canada. We’re not sure why this limitation exists, as Hearing Protection is the least likely of the three features to be encumbered by regulatory hurdles, yet there it is.
For the other two features, Apple notes that “all features may not be available for all countries or regions” and points users to an AirPods Pro feature availability page that doesn’t exist yet. That’s a fairly common problem with RC builds; Apple may not publish that page until Monday’s public iOS 18.1 release. The footnotes on Apple’s AirPods Pro Hearing Health page also link to a non-existent support article on Hearing Protection information.
Nevertheless, it’s the Hearing Aid feature that seems likely to be the most limited. In many countries, hearing aids are considered medical devices that require a prescription from an audiologist or other related health professional. The FDA cleared over-the-counter hearing aids in 2021, but that only applies in the US. As iPhone in Canada reported last month, Health Canada has made no such exceptions. Apple’s Canadian AirPods Pro page lacks a dedicated “Hearing Health” tab and only mentions Hearing Protection — not even the hearing test. There’s even less here for the AirPods in the UK and Australia, although it appears that Germany will get both Hearing Aid and Hearing Test features, as will Japan.
While we’ll have to wait until Apple publishes its official list next week to see how this will all play out, it looks like only AirPods Pro users in the US will get the entire trio of hearing health features. For everyone else, it will be a mixed bag until Apple can deal with whatever regulatory hurdles are preventing it from launching all the features elsewhere.
