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Upgrading your Watch to the forthcoming WatchOS 2

WatchOS 2 and IOS9 will be available from 16 September, and a lot of us will be upgrading then or very soon after. The purpose of this tip is to start collecting together information that might be useful and (hopefully) help people to avoid some possible issues with the first major update to this new device. Any comments, suggestions or questions (criticisms, even) are welcome.

 

Details of how to perform the update will be published on Apple's support pages. Apple's upgrade processes are reliable and safe, but there are a couple of things we can do to help them stay that way. Much of this is based on experience with iPhone/iPad upgrades and the occasional issues that people have encountered.

 

1. WatchOS 2 requires that the iPhone be running IOS 9 - it won't install if the phone is on iOS 8. So the phone has to be updated to iOS 9 first. Then, when that's done, the Watch update will become available (via the Watch app on the phone).

2. Allow plenty of time to go through the process. You have to download and install the update on the phone. Then, once you've chosen to update the Watch, the process has to:

  • Download the WatchOS update to the phone
  • Transfer the WatchOS update to the Watch
  • Install it on the Watch

That might take quite a while. For WatchOS 1.1 it seems to take varying amounts of time - from 20 minutes to more than an hour. Apple's servers tend to get very busy (and therefore slow) in the hours immediately following release, and that can extend the time a lot. So don't start in on this if you only have a few minutes to spare.

3. Backup the phone. Backup the phone. BACKUP THE PHONE. Everything will probably work fine. But nothing's perfect. If you have data that you want to keep, especially Health and Activity data, the way to ensure you don't lose it is to take a backup from the phone before you start (i.e. before updating to IOS 9). My strong recommendation is to do a full encrypted backup in iTunes (iTunes backups must be encrypted to save Health and Activity data). Plenty of people use iCloud backups, and have no problems at all. I am more comfortable knowing that I have a full backup file right there on my desktop. Better safe than sorry. If you have a backup, then even if the whole update process goes awry, you can be certain of recovering successfully.

4. For those that have done iPhone/iPad updates in the past, there's one critical difference with the Watch - there's no option to download the full firmware file in iTunes. The *only* route is over the air, via the phone.

 

There will more information about the specifics of both updates on release day and plenty of people willing to help if you're unsure or in trouble

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