When watchOS 5 debuted it had a new feature called Walkie Talkie, which allowed you have a one-on-one conversation with anyone who has a compatible Apple Watch. Shades of Dick Tracy, it was cool. But, alas, it is no more.
In July 2019, Apple disabled the Walkie-Talkie app for the Apple Watch because of a bug that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent.
The tech giant had this to say: “We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.”
That was over a year ago. It would seem that Apple has had plenty of time to fix the problem. There’s been no evidence of it, but perhaps the tech giant could surprise us by returning Walkie-Talkie in watchOS 7.
