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Four iPhone apps whose only job is to notice smart glasses nearby shipped or changed between September 28 and October 1, two of them as first releases. Not one of them can tell you whether a camera is recording, and two of the four say exactly that in their own App Store listings.
Spectre 2.5 is the only one of the four whose release notes mention glasses that rotate their Bluetooth address. Image: 6tSevn BV Image: 6tSevn BV
Spectre, from 6tSevn BV, reached 2.5 on September 28 at 13:34 UTC. Its App Store listing says “Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta frames are now recognised from advertisement data earlier versions overlooked” and that “Smart glasses that rotate their Bluetooth address no longer appear as repeated duplicate detections”, which is one scanner’s way of saying that a pair whose address changes had been turning up as several. Spex and Smart Glass Finder both arrived as 1.0 on September 28, and AntiZuck reached 1.1.0 on October 1 at 19:08 UTC.
The apps hear advertisements, not cameras
None of the four connects to anything. Spectre’s own description is blunt about the method: “Spectre passively listens for Bluetooth signals broadcast by smart glasses… No pairing. No connection to the device. Pure detection.” It identifies what it hears from “Bluetooth manufacturer IDs, service UUIDs, and name patterns”.
Spectre’s store artwork promises something larger. “Know when you’re recorded”, it reads. Spex, one of the two apps that first appeared on September 28, says the opposite in its own copy: “Spex detects Bluetooth advertisements. It does not detect recording or streaming.”
Spex is the most forthcoming of the four about where detection fails. “Glasses that are already connected and idle broadcast rarely, and no detector can promise otherwise; glasses that aren’t advertising can’t be seen at all,” its listing says, and “a quiet Radar is not a guarantee that no smart glasses are nearby”.
Smart Glass Finder, from GKM Interactive UG, says plainly that “the app cannot tell whether a camera is recording”. AntiZuck says detection “is best-effort and depends on what nearby devices advertise over Bluetooth”, and that “smart glasses mostly broadcast at power-on, pairing, and case-open, so coverage is opportunistic”. An older app drew the same line in September, when ZuckOff spotted Ray-Ban Meta and Snap Spectacles over Bluetooth but not whether they record.
Spotting glasses is now a subscription
AntiZuck’s 1.1.0 release turned a paid app into a free one with a paid tier on top. Developer Albert Pariente Cohen prices Pro at $9.99 once, $8.99 a year or $2.99 a month in the US, and says anyone who bought the app before the change already has Pro Lifetime. Spectre Pro costs $0.99 a month or $4.99 a year on the US App Store, and Spex Pro is a single $3.99 purchase, both read on October 3 at 21:00 UTC.
What the money buys is persistence rather than better hearing: alerts while the app is closed, a longer sightings history, and the lists that stop your own glasses setting the thing off every time you put them on.
Each app watches a different list of brands
Spectre names 19 brands, from Ray-Ban Meta and Snap Spectacles down to Fauna Audio and Razer Anzu. Spex names nine, including Meta Ray-Ban Display and Rokid, and flags Meta Quest headsets as headsets rather than glasses. AntiZuck names four. Spectre also asks the most of the phone, requiring iOS 26 against iOS 18 for Spex and AntiZuck and iOS 18.2 for Smart Glass Finder.
No independent test of any of the four exists, and the confidence figure each one puts next to a detection is its own. Nothing outside the phone is helping either: California’s governor vetoed a bill that would have made disabling a glasses recording light a crime, and the Dutch government told parliament it will not push for camera-glasses design rules.
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