Yes, this is how things work now.
First, to explain what is happening here: if you have both a phone and watch app installed, watchOS and iOS try to coordinate between phone and watch notifications.
The concept here is that if there is a main app and a companion app, they could both be sending a notification, then the notification would alert on both, which is a deviation from how notification mirroring is handled if there is an iOS app but no watch app. The watch waits for the iOS notification to fire so they can determine if this is the same notification that needs to be deduped, displayed on one device but not the other, or separate notifications to be displayed both.
If the iOS app doesn’t send a notification on the phone, the watch will timeout after 13 seconds and alert anyway.
The best solution to this is to send the same notification on both devices simultaneously, and ensuring the UNNotificationRequest.identifier matches on both notifications. This will let the systems determine how to handle the notification correctly and quickly, and the notification will alert right away.
We have had reports of varying degrees of success about this, and how well this solution will work for you will depend on the specifics of your implementation.
Argun Tekant /
DTS Engineer /
Core Technologies
