Apple may have just killed one of the Apple Watch’s most forgotten apps, and most people probably won’t notice.
In the first developer beta of watchOS 27, Walkie-Talkie has disappeared entirely. It’s no longer listed among Apple Watch apps, and it’s gone from Control Center too. Apple hasn’t said a word about it, which is often how these things happen in early betas.
A feature simply vanishes, and everyone is left wondering whether it’s a bug, a temporary removal, or the beginning of the end.
If you’ve owned an Apple Watch for a while, you might remember when Walkie-Talkie debuted in 2018. The idea was surprisingly fun: tap a button, talk into your watch, and your voice would instantly play through someone else’s Apple Watch.
The problem is that the novelty wore off faster than the technology improved because Walkie-Talkie never really evolved.
While Apple spent the last several years adding health features, fitness metrics, sleep tracking, safety tools, and deeper messaging features, Walkie-Talkie stayed almost exactly the same. It always felt like a feature that launched with good intentions but was then pushed to the back of the room.
Reliability didn’t help its case either. Even among people who genuinely liked using it, connection issues were common. Sometimes messages arrived instantly, while other times they didn’t arrive at all. Eventually, many users stopped trusting it enough to make it part of their daily routine.
There’s also some history here. Less than a year after launch, Apple temporarily disabled Walkie-Talkie after discovering a security flaw that could allow someone to listen through another user’s watch without permission. The issue was fixed, but the feature never quite regained momentum afterward.
That’s why its disappearance in watchOS 27 feels less like a surprise and more like the final chapter of a feature Apple stopped paying attention to a long time ago.
Of course, this is still the first developer beta. Apple could bring Walkie-Talkie back before watchOS 27 ships this fall. It’s happened before with beta features.
But if you’ve followed Apple’s software strategy over the years, you know the pattern: features that sit unchanged release after release don’t usually get a second life.
The more interesting possibility is that Apple is rebuilding it. Instant voice communication from your wrist still makes sense in theory. Parents use it with kids and families use it around the house. The concept was never the problem, but the execution was.
For now, though, Walkie-Talkie is gone. Whether this is a temporary disappearance or a permanent retirement is one of those small watchOS mysteries we’ll probably learn more about as the beta cycle continues.
