Haptic alarms broken in watchOS 4 (GM)

App & System Services Core OS Beta watchOS

fouquet OP

Created Sep ’17

Replies 16

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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.

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KJ L OP

Oct ’17

to your original post, I was able to get haptic alarms working on my Apple Watch by having a (disabled) vibrating alarm set on my iPhone 6S. But a few days ago I turned off the vibration on a different alarm (the one I use to get up in the morning) and I suddenly stopped getting any haptics on my Apple Watch alarms.

The trick to getting haptic alarms on the Apple Watch only works if you don't subsequently change the vibration setting on any of your iPhone's alarms.

Terrible bug. This is one of the things I used to hate about switching to iPhones from my old Blackberries. RIM always prioritized their alarms and LED lights, no matter what else changed in the firmware. They knew their customers were mostly corporate, and losing alarms was a 110% no-no. But literally my first-ever iPhone (an iPhone 4, I think it was) happened to have unreliable alarms, and it was not a happy coincidence.

Looks like Apple still doesn't care about alarms. Shame.