The Apple Watch Walkie-Talkie app has been temporarily disabled due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent. Walkie-Talkie is an Apple Watch app that allows users to easily communicate with each other via voice from their wrists using a push-to-talk function. The App was added to the Apple Watch with last year’s release of watchOS 5.

Apple has apologized for the bug and also has confirmed that it is working on developing a fix for the issue.  They promise they will restore the functionality as soon as possible.

“We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience,” Apple said in a statement.

Now the app itself will remain installed on users’ Apple Watches, but it will not be functional until the fix is deployed.

Published by Tony Shepherd & last updated on July 15, 2019 2:56 am

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