Apple Watch with iPhone SE Siri not playing nice!

I 100% echo the comments of the original poster.

I just worked with Apple to Backup, Unpair and Repair my Apple Watch 4 44mm to my iPhone SE and Siri is now functioning much better. A slight delay on 1/10 requests versus barely fulfilling any. I am in the latest software for both phone and watch at the time of this writing. I know updates to the pairing/connectivity were deployed in iOS 13.1. I had last tried this troubleshooting process in 13.0.x.

Apple sent me a replacement Watch 4 44m to resolve this bug. (Fast, two day turnaround.)

Bad news. 

After spending the day getting the Watch back up and running... and doing it from a raw, fresh setup (because my backups since 1/20 are nowhere to be found)... I can confirm this is a software/config problem and not a hardware problem.

I am still getting many dropped and paused Siri instances, at least 25%, sometimes all - despite being connected to the watch, and in my Wi-Fi with no coverage issues on my iPhone, iPads, or MacBook - and that of my family. (My wife’s watch does not have any issues. She has an Apple Watch 4 with iPhone 8. So this isolates our local network or cellular as an issue.)

As described from day one of three months of a single ticket, this is an incompatibility between the iPhone SE and Apple Watch 4 that was created during the WatchOS 6 and iOS 13 codebase upgrade. 

Nest steps I see are:

• Replace iPhone Watch 4 with Watch 3 or 5 - to test iPhone SE
• Replace iPhone SE with iPhone 8 - to test Watch
• Work with Apple Engineering to test signal throughput of:
  • Watch 4 > iPhone SE
  • iPhone SE > Watch 4
  • Watch 4 > iPhone 8
  • IPhone 8 > Watch 4

I’m not happy about the sheer amount of time I’ve spent on this, both as a user and as a significant stockholder. I’ve been pushing QA on this bug for nearly 6 months. I updated the Apple Support facing this problem as well.

I have had three support calls with Apple about this. I agree with the vast majority of descriptions here on the failure, and am having the same experience. I would not wait longer for an update.

It was fist discussed with a traditional support rep. We tried pairing/unpairing to no avail.

It was escalated in the next call, 4 days later, to complete the latest update that came out Sunday night. This did not resolve the issue, as several others had commented.

We currently have a support ticket open with two senior support reps, and the Engineering team is reviewing. They expect to get back to me by end of day Saturday. I will report back positive or negative results.

The senior support rep did mention they do not really review these forums, so if you have a problem, you need to call Apple Support. Also, the ‘Apple Support’ app on the App Store is a fantastic way to quickly get someone on the phone, and keep track of your support tickets.

Today I got an old iPhone 8 from a friend.

After restoring my latest iPhone SE backup on it I can confirm it now works like a charm paired with Watch S4.

No more “oh oh I lost connection!“ messages from Siri when issuing a command.

A real shame this couldn’t work correctly on the old SE.

I like the form factor of the smaller models but I guess that’s the way it is for now.

I gave up on this and bit the bullet and decided to buy a new iPhone a bit earlier than I would have. This was after many lengthy calls with Support over many hours, sharing of logs, re-pairing, escalations to engineers, everything.

I believe Apple doesn't know how to fix this so that helped my decision.

iPhone 11, watch works perfectly now, its definitely a bug between the watch and the SE....

My problem was between iPhone SE and the Series 5 from the get go. I gave in and got the new iPhone SE 2020 and what true joy to have the watch functioning as it should! Gone are the "Oh ohs..", "Sorry, try again" and other annoying messages.

*dons tinfoil hat* perhaps this problem was created so as to have users upgrade?

Hello, sadly, I am in the same boat to.

I have had the iPhone SE since a few years and I have had 3 Apple Watches paired with it.

Series 2, 3 and now 4. I have also had the original Apple Watch since the early release, paired with my old iPhone 5S.

They all worked perfectly as did my recently purchased Watch 4.

Up until the recent upgrade.

Since the WatchOS upgrade to 6 I have lost the ability to use Siri (well, it works but real bad) and I have also lost the convenience of making and receiving calls on the Watch as most of the times I get the “connection lost“ error message.

As pointed out by the others, turning off the iPhone or it’s Bluetooth service restores functionality as normal.

I just came across this thread that brought me here and while I am happy to be in good company, I am disappointed by the apparent lack of response by Apple in fixing what appears to be a well known bug.

Annoying to say the least.

/P

There was a system s/w update a few hours ago. WatchOS 6.1.3

Did it solve the issue for anybody?

(I am waiting for my Watch to automatically update so I can’t post any feedback yet)

Well I'm not familiar with your wife's settings; I'll leave that up to you :D

I goto Settings --> Wifi : often it is not latched onto the network thus tapping the network to force it to join.

I would have thought the watch is smart enough that if BT signal is weak it'd automatically join the wifi network. Not so.

UPDATE of February 11th:

For those of you that might be interested, don’t waste your time on chasing yet another update.

I just updatet my iPhone SE to Public Beta iOS 13.4 to no avail.

The “lost connection“ issue persists.. ;-(

I also have the same problem.

siri, phone, map and camera app.

Please do a test to launch the applewatch camera app.

It's a low probability, but it fails to boot.

Support is very interested in this bug.

If you encounter this issue, please report it to Support.

Thanks for that, please will you inform Apple Support about your problem, the more people report it the more likely Apple are to fix the problem.

Exactly the same issue, a similar thread with other customers suffering the same issues is here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250695961?answerId=251766750022&page=1

I've gone through countless re-pairing, restored my iPhone SE as a new iPhone, indoors, outdoors, nothing makes it work reliably. My series 4 watch worked perfectly on its original OS5 but as soon as I updated to OS6 the problem started.

My watch connects by bluetooth to other devices such as an external speaker, why the **** doesn't it work properly with an iPhone SE?

Had the watch around 7 months, nearly 5 months of that it hasn't worked as intended.

Currently on Watch OS 6.1.1 iOS 13.3