In 2024, Apple shipped something genuinely great: AirPods Pro can run a clinical-style hearing test and then act as hearing assistance, tuned to your ears. People love it. There's just one catch — it needs an iPhone to set up, recent AirPods to run, and if you're on Android you get nothing.
Meanwhile, the average pair of prescription hearing aids costs about $4,700, and surveys show a $1,500 device is simply out of reach for more than half the people who need one. There are a billion-plus Android phones out there, most of them sitting next to a pair of ordinary earbuds that already contain everything you physically need: a microphone, a DAC, and speakers.
The gap seemed absurd. So I've spent the past weeks building OpenHearing — a free, GPLv3 Android app that does the whole pipeline:
Hearing check — a pure-tone test using the modified Hughson–Westlake staircase (the same adaptive up-down procedure audiologists use), per ear, per frequency. Or skip it and type in the numbers from a real audiogram.
Sound profile — the results are fitted into a per-ear gain curve (half-gain rule for v1; NAL-NL2 is a pluggable strategy for later).
