Apple Watch (waiting for first unlock) in Xcode

My lightning cable was going through my LG 5k. Plugged it in directly into the mac, seems to work for now. I lost so many days fighting this.

I see this a lot and found the following workaround (after ensuring the developer mode settings):

• First install the Phone build. That is Build & Run the Phone target to your phone that is paired with Watch
• Then, switch targets and Build & Run the Watch target.

This seems to make the app ready to run in the eyes of Xcode. It just seems like the message displayed by Xcode is a red herring and the real issue is not communicated properly.

I know this is an old thread, but I stumbled on it while wasting hours today trying to get a simple 'watch only' Xcode app installed on an Apple Watch. Here's what finally worked for me. After all of the other items mentioned (restarts; setting the developer mode to yes on both the iPhone and Watch; switching between network & direct connection; adding & removing the iPhone from 'Manage Run Destinations'; and probably some steps I'm forgetting). I did have to clear one last hurdle which was signing the app, but I did that as a 'personal' team and restarted Xcode to get around that issue. But even with all that, I kept having problems getting my app to load on the phone. So I tried one last trick that worked for me when everything else failed. I put the watch on! That kept it unlocked and the code was able to deploy successfully to the watch through the phone (I used a direct connection instead of the network). It still took some time, saw various messages in Xcode about loading symbols from the phone or installing the app, but it finally worked! From a developer experience, it was a truly miserable one today. This should have taken me 5-10 minutes, tops; instead, it took me 2-3 hours, maybe more.