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Yes!!

Shocked we made it this far in life without one! Itching to put devices inside and light the air inside up without worrying about licensing!

We actually ended up seeing a life size Faraday cage at Indian Institute of Science—felt good to see that the construction was similar to our approach

Yeah, Apple sometimes checks MCC/MNC on the cellular network as well, for some reason they chose not to lock it down that way here.

However, if they did lock it to require an iPhone, the way we would activate would be by using our Faraday cage to spoof GPS inside it, and maybe a spoofed base station.

This was one of the rabbitholes I chased down, but didn't find anything.

At some level, this was just the easier approach :)

I'm sure there's something though. Apple changed the URL handler schemes for iOS 18, so a lot of old repos that reference that don't work anymore.

That's exactly what we did in the end—used a commercial VPN and provided internet to the device over the USB cable. Could have probably used a Tailscale on a VPS somewhere too.

Yep, sorry!

It is Binary Ninja

Binary Ninja: https://binary.ninja/ :)

Think someone has already linked it below!

5GHz has quite low penetrating power, so for the most part our issue was 2.4GHz.

Probably would work, however I suspect the changes would not be as sticky.

Apple has some slightly more complex checks that they have used in the past to georestrict stuff like ECG, by using MCC/MNC codes from your mobile network. I suspect that the alt stores would be region locked and stop working outside the EU—but that remains to be tested, and seems like a fun thing to experiment with.

It's all too early to tell, but we'll know after a week or so. The battery life thing is not seeming like a big problem, since the existing device needs batteries changed every few days or charged every night.

As for the sound quality, a few of our grandparents have tried it, and while they say it sounds 'different', it's not necessarily bad. Grandma was actually quite content even with just the old EQ settings that shipped pre iOS 18 for folks with hearing issues.

Thanks for the kind words!

Thank you for reading and the kind words! We're almost looking forward to this loophole being shut down to really make things a tad bit more challenging haha

We've got some ideas for the Faraday cage—a whole bunch of networks research and hacking that we can do without messing up live systems! It's also really nice to be able to test a device in isolation, without worrying about whether it's phoning back home in some way.

haha, I think I've got many miles to go before I'm qualified to answer this :')

I've just been hacking away at things since I was in middle school, am lucky that there's some transfer. LLMs have also been a huge unlock—really cool to be able to try things at near speed of thought!

what earphones do you use — or want to get? I'm very happy with my Shure Aonic 3s, a very loyal IEMs guy!

We built it ourselves actually!

The first prototype was just aluminium foil, tape and hope, but we wanted something more solid so we built one out of n°100 copper mesh and some 2020 aluminium extrusions!

Hey! I'm Rithwik, one of the authors of the article, happy to answer questions etc!

Heya! One of the authors here.

Nope, its a one time thing. When the feature is enabled, a flag is set on the iCloud account, so you can travel anywhere and have it work. At the same time, a EQ profile is pushed to the transparency mode of the Airpods, enabling the hearing aid features.

Once done, it sticks with the Airpods, unless you reset them.

However, an interesting quirk is that if you enable this on someone's airpods, and _their_ device/account does not have it 'available', they wont be able to tweak the settings on their device.

Hey there, author here!

Unfortunately, we're not able to share all the details until the issues are patched and can't share the APK because (legal reasons)

That said, I've already seen it widely in circulation though, especially on X.