Hacker News Reader

Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

The biggest disappointment for me, from poking around the tvOS SDK docs, is that the high-fidelity microphone (which clearly must exist on the remote in order for the Siri-enabled features to work) is not accessible from a public API.

Here's hoping someone will figure out a private API for it, even if I won't be able to ship apps like that on the App Store.

View on HN

On the surface that would be a security risk that is hard to quantify (how would they figure out that an app is occasionally capturing audio from someone's living room and using and/or storing or sending it in a way that it's not supposed to?). For instance it could probably be used for some evil scheme to make targeted advertising.

They might be able to open it later if they can find a way to do so, e.g. perhaps only allowing post-processed text to be returned and not raw audio, and even then only whitelisted words.

They could do it via the granular permissions system on iOS, e.g., "This app wants to access the microphone. Allow/Deny"

Though it might be weird having to explicitly read and grant permissions to a TV app.

Why not make an indicator like the ReplayKit does for SpriteKit with a big REC indicator. https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=605

That's rather sad. Weirdly enough, the remote with a microphone is only shipping in countries with Siri support. I wonder what happens when a new country gets support - do you need to buy a new remote?

I'm pretty sure I read that no matter the country they will all get the same hardware. Let me find the link.

Edit: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/16994

Ah, that makes more sense. Though rather poorly worded tech specs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com