[tauntz]

> Without good soft-key support, these phones are unusable.

Depends on what you mean by "good". I worked with PTT for a long time (disclosure: Motorola WAVE), Android devices with HW buttons, wired PTT headsets and buttons, wireless PTT headsets and buttons, you name it. It's a world of pain and _lots_ of edge cases and testing but in the end, there was always a way to beat any device into submission and get it working for most common use-cases. Any questions, LMK :)

[r2sk5t]

I can affirm that beating devices into submission is possible :-) We support iOS too with PTT headsets, Airpods, and other BT headsets and that gets interesting in different ways.

Based on my experience, it seems hardware vendors are not treating soft-keys as a core requirement and are generally bolting support on and in some cases omitting it. It's as if the requirements didn't include third party app support beyond the carriers PTT products that they OEM.

[tauntz]

Indeed! Add to this older Android OS support, Classic BT devices, BT LE devices, combined LE - Classic devices (and each with their own firmware quirks), audio routing, undocumented APIs ..and the list goes on and on. PTT is a wonderful world :)

[dzhiurgis]

Just curious why something like Apple doesn't support it out of the box? Is there some sort of regulation that won't let them or just plain ignorance of customers?

I guess we got softcore version where you can ask Siri be kind enough to attempt to send a voice message, which absolutely sucks for unsupported languages.

[r2sk5t]

Apple has been highly supportive of what we're doing. I mentioned Apple because it's difficult in different ways and there are many edge cases; especially with BT & wired headsets.