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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

I recently set up my Apple Watch and discovered the Walkie-talkie function.

Basically, it allows me to send voice memo's to another person, where the Apple Watch on the receiving end will play the voice memo when the Walkie-talkie function is on.

But here is the thing: I don't want to be disturbed 24/7 by a voice coming from my wrist. When I am available for others, my iMessage or Signal app will inform me of any incoming messages just as well. And when I am not available, I don't want the extra hassle of switching my Walkie-talkie app off as well as setting my phone to "do not disturb"

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For certain moments and limited groups the inmediate playing could be very useful, like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that. Last vacations I was looking for something like this while skiing in Andorra with friends, as each call is in roaming and extremely expensive (like 8-10€ per call) But what I needed was a network independent app, and I couldn’t find one. So I guess this app fails short for Me anyway as it uses Facetime.

> like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that.

Wouldn't you rather use some actual radios for this? They make small PMR ones that aren't expensive, need no license/permit (in Germany at least) and have surprisingly good reach. We used a pair of these to communicate with people in a heavily reinforced concrete basement that blocked out cellular and data completely, and on hiking trips in the alps (though with a lot of rock in between you need at least something to reflect your signal, but that's still way better than yelling)

> But what I needed was a network independent app

Not sure if that's actually possible with decent reach. After all, I don't think you get direct control over iPhone/Apple Watch modems/transmitters and neither wifi nor bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

Yes, modern PMR can be very good amd afordable, and I own 4 of them!. But for this trip I couldn’t take them with me and was looking for a mobile phone solution. I guess you are right and they simply don’t have the power..

> bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

Bluetooth 5 has up to 1km performance at few hundred kbps. With good codecs thats near real time. Of course Apple doesn't support it.

The "up to" tends to dissipate very quickly in an urban setting without line of sight and with much interference on the same band...

In urban settings you normally have 4G

Yes I’m hoping there will be ways to allow walkIe talkie to be blocked during certain focus modes. It sucks there’s no way to send the equivalent of “to be listened to later” voice memos. So if the person has it off there’s nothing you can do.

I wanted to try it but I couldn't even get it to work between my and my wife's watch (or my friend's for that matter). It simply doesn't work.

But yeah, I wouldn't see me using this function for the reason you mentioned. It's "too wild". Perhaps now with the user profiles it would be possible to not allow messages when you're in certain modes (like "work" or "do not disturb"). Can you do that or does it have to be always on?

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