Meta and Apple have been engaged in a months-long back-and-forth over how Apple should implement EU-mandated pairing for third-party devices. Here are the details.
As part of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, Apple is required to let third-party devices access certain iPhone and iPad features that are currently more deeply integrated with the company’s own accessories.
That includes pairing and connectivity capabilities intended to give competing products access comparable to that available to accessories such as AirPods and Apple Watch.
For instance, Apple has already introduced proximity-triggered pairing in the EU with iOS 26.5, allowing compatible third-party accessories brought near an iPhone to trigger a streamlined pairing prompt.
Meta’s request, however, concerns a separate capability that Apple has yet to release: letting an accessory paired with one iPhone or iPad automatically become available on the user’s other iPhones and iPads, similar to how AirPods pairing is synced across Apple devices.
As spotted by Aaron Perris, Apple and Meta have been engaged in a back-and-forth since October 2025, when Meta first submitted an interoperability request for the feature.
Based on the correspondence, which is publicly available through Apple’s EU interoperability portal, Meta wants Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Quest headsets to be automatically available on the user’s other iPhones and iPads when paired with one iPhone or iPad.
Here’s Meta:
Certain Apple accessories, such as AirPods, once paired with a user’s iOS device, are automatically paired with and can be used across multiple other Apple devices. […] We want to be able to offer a similar pairing/syncing experience to our users in relation to their Meta devices and iPhones. More specifically, we would like to be able to offer our users the ability, once they pair their Meta device with their iPhone or iPad, to have that Meta device automatically available and paired on other iPhones and iPads associated with that user, in a similar way to how AirPods automatically pair with a user’s Apple devices. In terms of user experience, we want to provide the functionality which makes the device available for audio and accessible by apps, without the need for additional system prompts after the first pairing. (The best experience we can offer today still requires the user to navigate additional prompts on each new iPhone/iPad.) Due to the limited access we currently have to the iPhone’s Bluetooth pairing functionality, we are unable to build a similar system using our own cloud services.
Apple’s initial response was to propose a new API that would allow third-party apps to sync the information needed to reuse an accessory pairing across a user’s other iPhones and iPads. Meta said the proposal would provide the core functionality it requested, but objected to Apple tying API access to AccessorySetupKit, arguing that doing so could disrupt its existing pairing experience outside the EU.
In the exchanges that followed, Apple said it had carefully reviewed Meta’s concerns but still intended to proceed with its proposed plan, noting that Meta had acknowledged the solution would provide the core functionality it requested.
Apple also said other developers had adopted AccessorySetupKit outside the EU without encountering the same issues raised by Meta.
Meta, in turn, reaffirmed that Apple’s approach could worsen the setup experience for its devices outside the EU, clarified its technical concerns, and again asked Apple to reconsider how the feature would be implemented.
To read the full exchange, follow this link.
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