An unofficial app says it will flash RayNeo's iO glasses over Bluetooth, and can brick them
An unofficial project called Spare io says its iPhone app will write new firmware to RayNeo’s iO glasses over the Bluetooth link the glasses already use, with no vendor app and no account. Spare io’s own page says the update “only starts when you tap”, and the same page warns that “flashing modified firmware can brick your glasses, break features and void the warranty”.
Spare io's own image of the clock view it puts in the glasses display. Image: Spare io
The project is run by Technologie Spare inc. of Montreal, and it is blunt about what it is not: “Spare io is an unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by RayNeo.”
The safety checks are the project’s own
Spare io’s page lists the conditions it puts on an update. New firmware downloads in the background and resumes if interrupted, “every file is checked before the button lights up”, and the glasses need at least 50% battery and have to be idle before anything starts.
The control centre the project shows under its launcher, one of the views it says the crown scrolls through. Image: Spare io
It also says “tampered or incomplete packages are refused, and you can’t be rolled back to an older release”, and that success is only reported once the glasses restart on the new version.
Nothing on the page puts RayNeo in that chain: the firmware comes from Spare io’s own server and the project says it distributes no vendor firmware, so the signature the updater checks is its own. Because downgrades are blocked, a release that goes wrong is not something an owner undoes by reinstalling the previous one.
Spare io publishes this image with the music feature, whose protocol it says it put through 300k fuzz cases. Image: Spare io
The firmware tooling is not in the open repository
The project’s GitHub repository is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence and holds a single commit, dated October 15. Its README calls it “the open UI layer: pages, animations and the app SDK header” and says “the glasses runtime, phone link, firmware tooling and feature apps are not part of this repository”.
So the component that writes to the glasses is not the component anyone can read. The page describes the glasses side as clean-room, counts “0 vendor files in the repository” and claims “300k fuzz cases for the music protocol”, all of them the project’s claims about its own work.
Navigation is one of the features the replacement app carries, alongside captions, memos and the assistant. Image: Spare io
RayNeo’s own app is what this sets itself against
Spare io is pitched as a replacement system for the iO glasses driven by one iPhone app: a launcher, live captions and translation, an all-day memo, a live prompt, music, navigation and an AI assistant. The page says the assistant’s questions go “to the service you set on your iPhone”, either Anthropic Claude or any OpenAI-compatible API, with the key held in the iPhone Keychain.
That is a wider remit than the separate unofficial project that exposes the iO’s two microphones as Mac audio inputs, and a direct answer to RayNeo’s own app, which downloads offline translation models and can fall back on the phone’s microphone.
It also runs against the way these projects usually end up. An unofficial web flasher for Even Realities’ G2 narrowed itself on October 13 to the vendor’s own firmware and barred custom builds, where Spare io proposes to ship its own.
None of it has shipped: on October 18 the page still read “Arriving October 16”, with a badge reading “TestFlight coming soon” and no public beta link, so every claim here is a claim about software nobody outside the project has run.
Spare io’s stated cadence is that requests and bugs get voted on, and the top three each Friday are fixed the following Monday. That clock starts when the beta does.
