Mac not unlocking after watchOS 7 update

Yep. The funny thing is that my wife has the same watch as me bought the same day and it seems fine. But, yes after about a day I unpaired it and set it up as a new watch. It seemed better for several hours but then had the same issues again. :(. I even uninstalled most of the watch applications since I don't really use most of them anyway but that didn't help either.

Thanks, ekieb, quite extraordinary, it seems to have worked and my watch has successfully unlocked Mac. Fingers crossed it keeps working. Would never have thought leaving removed files in bin would have left them not totally ineffective.

Crossing fingers failed. I have just checked Preferences having successfully unlocked Mac with watch and the unlock box is un-ticked once again and back to square one. Add this to poor battery life and rather regretting upgrading to WatchOS 7 so hastily!

I have a series 4 watch and the solution worked for me but after 1 hour I was back to the same problem. Repeating the instruction correct the issue, but again after 1 hour I was back to the same problem.

Not sure where the issue is originating from.

Thank you! This worked for me as well with a couple of additional steps. I rebooted my watch, iphone and macbook after making the changes. Then I had to re-enable auto unlock one more time.

It also appeared to fix an issue I had with the Homerun app not syncing to my watch. I guess something got messed up with the upgrade to watchOS 7, iOS 14, and macOS and clearing these files out reset the sync/handoff connectivity between the three.

stoska992's steps worked great, although, you only need to delete the "Auto Unlock: XXX's...." for the devices that you're having issues with. That will save you if it's working on some devices and not others from needing to re-enable it on all devices.

Thanks Earlen!

It works but just once, on the second time I wanted to unlock my Mac, the problem was there again. Amazingly the selection box in the System Preferences appeared unchecked, while I left it checked just a minute before...

I followed the instructions. However, when I delete "Auto Unlock: XXXX's ..." in Keychain, the files reappear after about a second. I then did all of the other deletions as advised but was still unable to enable auto unlock.

I would appreciate any further advice.

Thank you.

You are a lifesaver! it sounds so privileged to be complaining about my watch not unlocking my MacBook anymore, but it is such a improvement in the quality of my workday. So glad I found this article!

This also worked for me but when I selected the watch to unlock as usual, the process failed immediately over and over again almost as if it wasn't even trying. So I rebooted my 2018 Mac Mini running Catalina 10.15.7, my iPhone 11 Pro running iOS 14.0.1 and my Series 5 Apple Watch running Watch OS 7.01 and tried again. It failed the first time so I tried one more time considering this was the "it will fail the first time" failure. And bingo it worked.

Worked fine after rebooting MacBook Pro.

Auto-unlock was working until WatchOS 7.0 update. 7.0.1 didn't work either. Tried un/re-pairing watch with iPhone. No joy.

There were A LOT of "Auto Unlock" from step 3. I only ever paired my watch once before the attempt to fix this issue.

Thanks for posting this! Many hours saved!!!

Later,

Jeff

I've been having the same issue and tried all of the suggestions in this thread to no avail. I tried turning off "cellular" on the watch, and it worked immediately. Obviously you have to have a cellular model, but that's what did it for me. Thanks, all!

After several attempts and then a restart, it worked. The folks at AppleCare tried to fix it, failed after trying at great length, and then collected system info and sent it to engineering. After several days, engineering still had no solution, despite their best efforts.

So, a particularly big THANK YOU! Is appropriate here.

@RobertWyatt: Thank you. Your suggestion (toggling off/on KeyChain, but on my iPhone) just resolved the issue for me after ~2 days of attempting the fixes suggested by LongZheng and Stoska992 (which I believe are also necessary). Relieved to have this minor but frustrating issue fixed.