Eric Migicovsky, leader of the revived Pebble, is making smartwatches for himself. You’re just along for the ride.
“Apple makes it incredibly difficult for third-party devices to interact with things like iMessage or Siri or any of the built-in features on iOS,” Migicovsky told Gizmodo in a freewheeling video interview. “And that sucks. That sucks for competition. That sucks for innovation. That sucks for price.”
But if you don’t have a microphone how could you use it like a walkie talkie to communicate with your mates as if you were spies???
On a serious note, at least this is open source, so you can inspect and understand exactly how it works rather than assuming the black box behaves as advertised, without doing something nefarious behind the scenes.
And if you’re that bothered about that kind of thing being exploited against you, you should look into removing the hardware components. There are places that offer that as a service for phones (mainly removing cameras), so I’m sure some will do it for Pebbles. Assuming you don’t want to DIY.