iOS wearable integrations are bad, but somehow Meta Ray-Bans are very good. Voice assist to start a call, send a text, read a notification, etc. Did Meta get special access to do this?
Often this is via special entitlements [0]. Published APIs, which you're only allowed to use if Apple approve your request.
Apple typically don't publish the criteria for when they approve entitlements, so it's almost impossible to get approved. You need to be a big company with contacts inside Apple.
Meta, Google etc. will all have negotiated a bunch of these entitlements for their own apps. But smaller companies are totally shut out.
We have seen competitors (big, well-known apps) do things on iOS that most definitely are not possible with public APIs. Either Apple willingfully provides access to these APIs to a select few companies, or they don't care that they reverse-engineer private APIs and then use them. If it's the latter, the competitor app was probably too big to be banned from the app store for this.
Apple was unwilling to comment on the situation when we asked them.
For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches.
What you can't do is reply to a text without using voice, which is what I'd like.
>For voice integration, you can just provide a bluetooth microphone on you device and have it access Siri. Garmin have tried the same strategy on some of their watches.
If your watch does not support Bluetooth Classic with the headset profile then you can't pretend to be a mic. So watches with Bluetooth LE only can not utilize Siri.
I've still had some settings thrashing with my raybans - sometimes they will refuse to read messages and ask me over and over to enable a setting, which is already enabled. Seems more likely to be an Apple issue than Meta given it has roughly coincided with iOS upgrades.
> It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.
Unless I'm crazy, I think I've used my Meta Ray-Bans to do all of these things at some point. So is this a watch only limitation that Meta was able to avoid?
It might be because Meta iOS app is handling some of that handoff and its not possible to do these action purely via the BT api? It seems like in the end they recognize if that had an iOS app they could accomplish some of their wishlist items. However, there are other valid critiques here.
Seems to be correct, according to [0] the user needs to link the Meta View app with WhatsApp, not sure if the link is then made on the cloud or on the local device...:
"Use the Meta View app to connect Ray-Ban Stories and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to WhatsApp on your phone."
That sounds like FB Messenger and WhatsApp. I'm guessing they do some server side workaround that wouldn't work for regular text messages or Apple-y messages.
