Apple Watch 5 voice memo not syncing with iphone

People!!! I have tried absolutely everything mentioned above and below. Nothing worked and I was discouraged. Then I saw somebody mentioning on the second page to remove and then re-install Voice Memo. And for the love of God, it worked!!! All my recordings are safe and sound plus the phone is now synced with my watch. PLEASE TRY THIS FIRST!

People!!! I have tried absolutely everything mentioned above and below. Nothing worked and I was discouraged. Then I saw somebody mentioning on the second page to remove and then re-install Voice Memo. And for the love of God, it worked!!! All my recordings are safe and sound plus the phone is now synced with my watch. PLEASE TRY THIS FIRST!

I agree! I deleted the app. Went to the app store, and reinstalled it. That did the trick finally. I wouldn't call this issue "solved", just yet. So I'll follow up with a post in a week or so. I record two lectures a week at about 60 to 70 minutes. And they so far have uploaded flawlessly on my iPhone since the reinstall. But I'd like to give it a little more time because I don't trust it.

Great to know and thanks for sharing.

When you uninstall the app and reinstall it from the watch, do your old recordings on the watch get lost, or are they restored from iCould once you reinstall the app?

I don’t want to lose my existing recordings!

Ok I got impatient and didn’t wait for the answers. But I did solve the issue and kept all my recordings.

I did this by deleting the iOS app, not the WatchOS one - because I could export & save the VMs on my phone first.

Once reinstalled and first opened,

all memos were synced with the watch. Haven’t checked the Macbook yet.

Like others, I had an issue with my watch syncing the memos to my iphone. And like others, uninstalling the app and downloading it again worked....but only temporarily. It syncs for a few hours, but then stops syncing out of the blue and I have to uninstall again. Hopefully an issue Apple fixes soon...

I didn’t repair the devices, or delete the Voice memo app from iPhone or Apple Watch 5, as I didn’t want to lose my notes. Changing iCloud settings, rebooting both devices or hard rebooting iPhone didn’t help. But finally, after hard rebooting Apple Watch 5, The transfers started. Try this before the other methods, and keep your memos! Worked for me.

Yay!!!!! This worked for me. I rebooted both watch and iPhone, reset watch, re-paired watch. NOTHING worked except deleting the voice memo from my iPhone and Re-installing. Not only were my old recordings saved from the cloud but now my Watch recordings are showing on my iphone!!!! Thanks so much!

This happened to me too. I unpaired my watch then repaired it using the backup but now I don’t have any recordings on my Iwatch and they were very important recordings. Is there anyway to retrieve these recordings?

I have had this problem intermittently and cannot seem to take any specific actions that permanently fix it.

Until the latest version of iOS I used a similar app 'Just Press Record'. I never had any problem with it and it performs the same functions as Voice Memos.

Until Apple fix the problem, I am going back to 'Just Press Record'.

fyi, just confirmed with Sr. Apple tech support that the Apple Watch 5 does not support voice memos syncing from your iphone, ipad, or macbook back to the Apple watch. I asked them to request a feature request to add this feature. The whole point of the watch is to carry more of your info with you on the go. What if you record a note on your ipad or iphone, but don't have them with you? There's no way to reference them from the watch. Really disappointed for the $500 I paid for the watch.

I have the iPhone 11 IOS 13.1 and the Apple Watch series 5. I had an 8 hour voice memo on my watch that did not sync to my phone. I deleted the app from my phone and the recording disappeared from my watch. Is there anyway to get it back?

@JustinKoller I think you're out of luck.

I can reliably sync my watch and phone voice memos when they get mismatched, by rebooting both at the same time. At reboot, they sync up. However, you must NOT delete the Voice Memos app on the phone, it deletes all your voice memos everywhere when you do without any warning, I lost like 15 memos once doing that. Thanks, Apple.

This is a major issue of the Apple Watch sync.

I bought the watch last week, recorded an important meeting for 2 hours the same night.

The voice memo was not sync-ed even after a few hours.

I switched on iCloud -> Voice Memo Tab, my 2-hour recording on the watch is gone. The sync works fine while wiping the file in my watch, replacing with the iCloud old files.

Please DO NOT press the sync tab if you have recordings on your watch. It will wipe and replace them. I have gone to Genius Bar and called Apple Care. File is gone forever.

Please don't commit the same mistake that I did. It wasted a lot of my time and incurred a lot of stress due to the importance of the voice memo.

I had this problem too. Watch 5 WatchOS 6.2.5 and iPhone 11 Pro Max running OS 13.4.1. I solved in simply by going to my iCloud settings and turning on and off the Voice Memos toggle. Once I did that all the recordings from my watch appeared in the phone Voice Memos App.