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Comment by film42 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> Did Meta get special access to do this?

Apple would never give Meta access to private APIs. Eric has access to everything that the Meta View app is doing.

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.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

Are you saying that Meta obtained a special entitlement for their glasses that is not available for smaller companies? Source or investigation?

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.

So Pebble needs to open a Siri connection, ask it to read the latest text, then speech-to-text the response and show it on the watch.

And then the same in the other direction.

I wonder if you could synthesize a voice with TTS saying "hey siri, send a text to X saying Y", and send that over bluetooth as if it was mic input.

>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.

Interesting. This indicates that the inability for my Amazfit Balance to do this is indeed an artificial limitation, and not something that Apple prevents. <https://np.reddit.com/r/amazfit/comments/1j3ftbr/why_cant_ba...>

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.

That makes sense! Thank you for the explanation.

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.

Does it do anything that the linked article says it can't do?

> 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."

[0] https://faq.whatsapp.com/836703167795647?locale=en_US&cms_id...

It seems to say that it can do it: https://www.meta.com/help/ai-glasses/647079267216457/

On (FB) Messenger and WhatsApp. It's not the same.

So just like Apple they are leveraging integration with other products they own.

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.

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