Haptic alarms broken in watchOS 4 (GM)

I have a Series 0 Apple Watch Sport.


When an alarm is going off my Apple Watch no longer vibrates. All other haptic feedback (prominent or not) is working fine.


I had this problem for every watchOS beta so far, but it was never fixed. Now that the GM is out, I have to assume it's an intentional change (?)


This is kind of frustrating, because my main use case for the watch is the silent alarm 😟

Answered by Frickin in 261722022

Try this. Set up an alarm on your iphone and set it to vibrate (choose any vibration type, mine is set to default). The alarm does not have to be enabled, just set up (I even labeled mine as "Do Not Delete. Used for watch to vibrate." as a reminder to myself later to not get rid of it). Then set up an alarm on your watch to see if it then vibrates. This worked for me on my Series 1 and 2 watch after updating to iOS 4.

I installed the GM Seed on the 12th and noticed this immediately. I sleep with my watch on and in theater mode. Now my alarms don’t work!!! This isn’t good at all.

This started in earlier betas and has not been fixed yet unfortunately. My watch is a series 2 Nike+

I have this problem too. Final version of Watch OS 4.

Incredible! O.O

I also have this issue. This is very frustrating from Apple. The taptic feedback in alarms is very important to me, silent alarms are no longer possible. Please fix!

Accepted Answer

Try this. Set up an alarm on your iphone and set it to vibrate (choose any vibration type, mine is set to default). The alarm does not have to be enabled, just set up (I even labeled mine as "Do Not Delete. Used for watch to vibrate." as a reminder to myself later to not get rid of it). Then set up an alarm on your watch to see if it then vibrates. This worked for me on my Series 1 and 2 watch after updating to iOS 4.

That seems to work. Now the question. Do I trust it?

This worked for me. I was able to delete the iPhone alarm after the first watch alarm worked. Additional new alarms and modifed alarms on the watch worked after deleting the iPhone alarm.


My question is why would this work when phone alarms are not synced to the watch?

I have set 15 different alarms on my watch and tried different scenarios of my phone ringer being on and vibrate only being on and it is still vibrating on my watch at each alarm. I have also tested having the phone locked and unlocked at the time of alarm and my watch is still vibrating for the alarm notification. I have not removed the alarm I set up on my phone yet, but it is still disabled. Maybe this will help ease your mind. 🙂

My only thought to this is that the watch is set up to mirror the iphones alerts and the iphones alerts are not set until a new alarm is set up. The vibrate is then set and the watch then mirrors the iphones alert. I do not see an option in the Watch App under notifications for the alarm so I am assuming it is defaulted to mirror the iphone.

Thanks! This is actually working. So it appears this is a synchronisation bug between the iPhone and the Watch.

Thanks, excellent, I was affraid, that I would have to wait for watchOS update to fix this issue. It worked for me like a charm, I don't even have to keep alarm set on iphone, just set it once and add vibration on iphone, than you can delete it. On watch haptics will work properly again.

"My question is why would this work when phone alarms are not synced to the watch?"


Because it's software.

The recommendation worked perfectly. Thanks. It’s still a bug, 99% of iWatch users don’t know how to search for this solution.

Unbelievable... This actually worked. Thank so much!


Apple, this needs to be fixed ASAP. I did not find this solution with slightly other keywords in Google.

Thanks for this. It didn't occurr to me this started after I turned off the vibration on all my phone alarms!

Haptic alarms broken in watchOS 4 (GM)
 
 
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