What it is
Auracast is the new Bluetooth standard that lets a venue broadcast its audio to anyone nearby: the departure gate, the sermon, the TV wall at the gym. HearAura is the iPhone app that makes joining effortless if you wear LE Audio hearing aids or Auracast-capable earbuds. Scan a QR code or pick a nearby broadcast, and the app commands your devices to join, controls the broadcast volume, and can quiet your aids’ own microphones so you hear only the program.
Around that core: live captions generated entirely on the iPhone, Channels that stream conversation audio between nearby phones over the local network without touching the internet, and an Apple Watch companion for volume and mute.
This one is personal. I’m mostly deaf, and in loud spaces the difference between “borrowed venue headset” and “your own ears, your own tuning” is the whole point.
How it works
- The join flow writes the Bluetooth Broadcast Audio Scan Service control point directly: real GATT engineering against real hearing aids, including the vendor quirks (one brand ignores its own mute characteristic but honors microphone gain, so gain is the path).
- Captions run WhisperKit on-device; the venue can also publish an exact caption feed, and the app switches to it the moment one appears.
- Reviewers and the curious get a demo mode that simulates the entire join against a clearly-labeled fake device, because the honest answer to “how do you review hardware you don’t have” is to build the simulation into the product.
- Privacy by construction: no account, no analytics, venue lookups round your location to about a kilometer before the request leaves the phone.
Why it matters
Accessibility tech usually asks the person with hearing loss to carry the burden: special hardware, special counters, special permission. Auracast flips that, and an app like this is the missing remote control. Shipping it meant treating App Review as a design constraint, not an afterthought. Built end to end with Claude Code.