The Walkie-Talkie app may be gone from watchOS 27
Apple appears to have removed the dedicated Walkie-Talkie app from the Apple Watch. The change wasn’t officially announced by the company, but the app is nowhere to be found in the watchOS 27 beta, according to a MacRumors report.The update doesn’t have the Walkie-Talkie app in the app list, nor as an option inside the Control Center. While there’s a slight chance the feature may be present in the final release of watchOS 27, it’s much more likely for the experience to go away in the fall.
It was abandoned anyway
There are many ways to talk on the Apple Watch. | Image by PhoneArena
Launched with watchOS 5 and the Apple Watch Series 4 back in 2018, the Walkie-Talkie app is exclusive to the Apple Watch. The app allowed users to send push-to-talk voice messages to other Apple Watch owners, using the FaceTime infrastructure.
Despite the nostalgia-inducing name, Walkie-Talkie can be used to exchange messages over any distance. The best part about it is that it doesn’t require picking up your iPhone to just send a voice note.
As cool as that feature may have sounded, especially to 80s and 90s kids, it didn’t get a lot of attention from Apple. The app wasn’t further improved after it launched, which could be either the reason for or the consequence of not being all that popular.
Plenty of alternatives
Beyond the coolness factor of having something called a walkie-talkie on your wrist, the app has very limited use in today’s context. Fans of the app on Reddit say they use it all the time to talk to their family while shopping in big supermarkets or when they’re in different parts of the house. However, they could easily just send voice notes over iMessage or call and have practically the same experience.Probably that’s why Google never introduced a similar feature on Wear OS, though there are third-party apps offering the same functionality for Android users. Still, the most popular opinion about the feature among redditors appears to be that it was neat having it available even though they never used it.
It still deserves an announcement
I loved having the Walkie-Talkie feature available, though I have barely used it. Still, I would’ve appreciated it if Apple announced that it’ll be gone in watchOS 27.
