Walkie Talkie rarely connects to others and when it does it takes forever. Is there a fix?

Hey y'all!

I got my wife and I Apple Watch 4s with Cellular many months ago and they were great. We used the Walkie Talkie app as a novelty for quick messages and eventually found it was a pretty convenient way to communicate.

But a few updates into WatchOS5 is started getting sketchy. If I tried to connect to my wife it would only connect about half of the time. Some of those times it would tell me the connection failed but my wife would get the chime on her end and sometimes she could respond to me, but most of the time it still wouldn't work.

This has happened when we were both on cellular, when one of us was on cell and the other was on wifi at home, and even when both of us were just a few rooms apart on the same wifi network.

Has anyone had similar problems and managed to resolve them? I'm having the same problem with all my walkie talkie contacts and they seem to be having the problem with me.

Since the release of WatchOS6 Walkie Talkie has only gotten less reliable. And because of the time it takes to connect (a minute or more), it's gotten to the point that it's hardly even worth trying.

Reading the threads I see lots of folks having problems with the app/service and I feel like Apple will likely just dump it, but I hope they give it the effort the idea deserves and just get it working well.

It really was very handy - even if only in a 'Nextel' sort of way. (I probably just aged myself. LOL!)