My wife and I lost our Apple Walkie-Talkie app, so I'm building my own
For years, my wife and I talked through our watches. One tap, one sentence, a quick instant voice connection. Then iOS 27 arrived and Walkie-Talkie was gone. I build software for a living, so I'm doing the obvious thing: building a replacement, and documenting it every step of the way.
Series: My wife and I lost our Apple Walkie-Talkie app, so I'm building my own (1 article)
- 1My wife and I lost our Apple Walkie-Talkie app, so I'm building my own This article
Part 1 of my Public Build Series
My favourite app on my Apple Watch was never a fitness tracker or a fancy watch face. It was a simple but effective Walkie Talkie app to chat to my wife when we needed to.
It did one thing really good. You tapped a contact, held a big yellow button, and talked. On the other side, your voice came out of their wrist. No typing, no phone, no waiting for a reply.
iOS 27 and WatchOS 27 released, and I eagerly updated my watch, rookie mistake I know. Few days later, my wife tried to reach me via the Walkie Takie app, and she couldn't reach me, maybe just a bad connection or sometimes it was buggy. The next day, I tried to reach her via the Walkie Takie app, and saw it's no longer there?
Confusion, then shock, then a quick google here, and a claude chat there, only to be discovered it's no longer there. I got to my pc and went on the official site and read through the change logs and discovered it's no longer supported and have been removed.
Why such a small app mattered
The Walkie Talkie app was never about long conversations. It was for the small stuff. "On my way." "Do you want some coffee" or "Food is ready".
Those messages are too small for a phone call and a bit annoying to type on a watch. A quick voice note from your wrist sits right in the middle. It feels more personal than a text, and it takes two seconds. And you can hear your partners voice.
When it disappeared, it wasn't the same. That's usually a good sign that something is worth building.
What I'm attempting to build
The idea is simple: a walkie-talkie app that puts the Apple Watch first. It can use the iPhone too, but the watch is the main hardware.
Think of it as somewhere between Apple's Walkie-Talkie and Zello. Here's how I have it in my mind how I would like it to work:
- You open the app, pick a contact, and tap Connect.
- Their watch buzzes, even if the app is closed, and asks them to accept.
- If they accept, you're connected. Hold the button to talk, let go to listen.
- If they don't answer, you see "Not available" and that's it.
That's the first version. Voice messages for when the other person is busy, groups, and other extras can come later. I'd rather ship something small that my wife and I use every day than something big that never gets finished.
The catch
I know this would not be a quick weekend project, I have worked on native device tooling before, its never "just a quick thing".
An Apple Watch is built to save battery, so it's strict about what apps can do. A watch app can't sit in the background waiting for someone to talk. It can't keep a live connection open whenever it wants. And Apple's own push-to-talk toolkit only exists on the iPhone, not the watch.
So how do you wake up someone's watch and start talking straight away? The answer is to borrow the way phone calls work. When you tap Connect, the other watch gets a special notification that wakes the app, and the session runs like a call. That's what keeps it alive with the screen off. Some form of alive state.
The trade-off is that the incoming screen will look a bit like a phone call. Not ideal, but I will find something cool I can make it look better. Working within the platform's rules beats fighting them, and those rules shaped this design more than any feature list did.
Why I'm building it in public
I'm going to write about every step: the decisions, the mistakes, what it costs to run, and what I learn along the way. Some of it will work the first time. A lot of it won't. I expect more failures than successes the first time around.
Part of the reason is accountability. If I tell you I'm building it, I have to finish it. The other part is that I couldn't find many projects about building a real Apple Watch app from scratch, so maybe this helps someone else.
It doesn't have a name yet
The app has no name, and I'd love your help to suggest something that we can turn into a real product. And if you used Walkie-Talkie too, tell me what you miss most about it.
In the next part, I'll pick the name, claim it on the App Store, and set up the project. Follow along to see if a two-person walkie-talkie makes it all the way to the App Store.
If you are interested in following the journey, follow me, like this article and share your journey, would love to see what you are building
Series: My wife and I lost our Apple Walkie-Talkie app, so I'm building my own (1 article)
- 1My wife and I lost our Apple Walkie-Talkie app, so I'm building my own This article
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