[Apple Watch] Unable to Check for Update - Not connected to the internet error

I’m trying to pair my series 1 Apple Watch to my iPhone 13 pro max. Been trying for the past week and no luck.

After reading and doing multiple steps for 2 hours repeatedly, I followed one users advice with changing the language to Portuguese and the country as Afghanistan and it finally showed installing watchOS 8.6!!!! Hopefully after installing for 3 hours, this works but it’s more progress than I’ve had in the last 2 hours!

@apple, can we expect this to actually be addressed? This is ridiculous and none of these "tricks" worked for the phone. Seems to be something pretty simple in your code not properly checking the right connection, and this is going on 7+ years. Unbelievable.

Suffering this same problem and spent about 24 hours visiting multiple solutions without success.

I was pretty close on giving up, then decided to switch through various WiFi networks, seeing if using a fresh WiFi channel (and new bitrate) might unblock the update from happening.

It seems to have worked!

If you have an older watch like me, try connecting your phone via different WiFi standards. I use 802.11g by default on all of my devices, and temporarily switching to the slower, simpler 802.11b standard seems to have done the trick.

Good luck.

• What is the flashing prompt during the AW update attempt?
• After pairing the AW and just before checking for an update, there is a quick flash prompting the user to update the phone before it quickly disappears until another prompt finally appears after the failed attempt connecting to the Internet.
• See attached photo.

Fixed it! Iphone 11 / aw s3

After trying all the methods here without result. I read that some had solved it using older iphones, so i tried with an Iphone 6 and the download started!

Unable to check for update - apple watch issue https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/710850

Not exactly sure which solution worked for me but the things I tried were:

• reset my watch
• turning off my VPN
• deleting the watch app
• hard reset on my phone
• Re downloading the watch app

I did all these in that order and paired my watch again and it worked - didn’t even have to wait and install the software again, it took me right to the installation.

prior to this I tried the suggestions in this thread including changing my language and country and that didn’t work for me.

Greetings.

Background: iWatch Series 1 38mm - had battery issues, sat for a long time. Fixed the battery, attempted to pair with an iPhone 12 mini iOS 15.latestpatches without any luck. Tried everything mentioned in this post (probably twice).

Solution: Luckily I had held on to an old iPhone 6Plus. Brought back to life (iOS 12.latest), perform reset on iWatch, install watch app, pair and upgrade software on iWatch, unpair it from old phone and pair it with new phone.

I hope this helps you. Cheers.

As a few have said the issue is with the Watch not supporting 5Ghz wifi. I switched my phones connection to a 2.4Ghz wireless network, turned the watch off and back on, restarted the pairing process, start the watch update….voilà! It’s updating.

Note that I did take the extra step of putting the phone in airplane mode, while connected to the 2.4ghz band Wi-Finand rebooted the phone too while trying out this process. Worked like a charm.

Good luck to all with this.

2022 update, using iPhone 12 Pro Max & Apple Watch Series 5: it's Beem335i's solution that worked for me, you really do have to sign out of your Apple iD to make this work. I'll copy-paste their response below to save you all the scroll time...

I finally fixed it, guys! This is what I did to get it to finally update...

1. Hard reset apple watch > when the apple logo shows hold down the button next to the crown and hold for 30 seconds > select erase all settings and content.
2. After watch resets > power down the watch do not hard reset, move the power slider to the right you might have to put in your wrist to do that and then put it back on the charger.
3. On your iPhone sign out of iCloud completely > go to settings > general > scroll down > shut down iphone (do not hard reset)
4. Power up Watch and then your iPhone > sign into iCloud/AppleID
5. Start the pairing process > it should say your watch is now paired > select update > it will give you the update error again saying no internet but let it sit for a minute > boom it will start updating the watch. Headache is GONE hopefully!

Hope this works for everyone because after trying everything these are the steps that I took you might have to try a few times but mine worked the very first try.

Frustrated that this is what I've had to do, but it's worked. Finally!

I had this series 3 Apple Watch already setup and it worked on my iPhone XS Max. It has been about 6 months since I last used it. Went to use it and I needed to go through the pairing process again. Keep getting the infinite loop of Apple fails. I tried the hard reset and even full reset on both devices. No change. Still fail all over the place. Fail. Fail. FAIL! Try again… I even tried tricking it by turning off the Bluetooth on the iPhone and let it “think” for 30 seconds and turned the BT back on, just to see if there was some clog in the downloading, but nope. Still stuck in the loop. It is absolutely sickening that @apple just continues to ignore this issue. But guess what I got to work… some $40 junk “smart” watch from Amazon that said it would connect. I found it hard to believe but that actually paired. Extremely limited use but I thought I would do that then buy a new or new-to-me Apple watch that will likely do the same exact thing. Very disappointing support on Apple’s side. They should (slightly) be ashamed.

EdIt: I tried the “2022 Update” that supposedly worked for the OP. It did nothing for me except let the Checking For Updates just hang and keep that little loading wheel a turning. I had hopes for that too.

This is so massively frustrating. It’s seriously hard not to believe this is part of planned obsolescence. Frustrate your users to a point that they give up but are still so locked into your ecosystem that they continue to buy. Anyway, of all the F-UP’ed solutions, the one that worked for me was to change my country to Afghanistan and language to Spanish as I know that barely enough to navigate the prompts. ***** you Apple for not paying attention to a problem that is obviously not a one-off issue but not important enough for you to at least address.

welp confirmed. going from 13 Pro paired with series 4 - I had to enable 2.4ghz on my router and use the 2.4ghz wifi then it started downloading the update.

@patcwin ‘s method worked. Portuguese and selected Afghanistan. All to update a watch. To be fair, that has not been updated in 2 years.

But, says it will take 20 hours to update. Holy sh**z