Mac not unlocking after watchOS 7 update

This solution worked for me temporarily and now I am only getting the "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch" message.

I have restarted my computer, Apple Watch and iPhone multiple times with no luck.

Is anyone else still experiencing problems?

Thanks for this information! Your steps fixed my issue as well (Series 6 Apple Watch).

Have you come across an issue with the Trend data not showing in the "Fitness" app formerly known as "Activity"? If so, do you have a fix for that?

Unfortunately this didn't work for me. I followed all steps (which were all as described), then tried enabling watch unlock multiple times with no luck, then I repeated the process step by step and tried enabling it again multiple times and it still says Mac can't communicate with the watch.

Thank you for this. Worked great in my case. I know that WatchOS7 has been driving me crazy the last several days. It is one of the few times in my history of Apple products that i really would go back to an earlier OS version if I could easily do so. My Series 3 LTE watch crashes at least a few times every day now. Was solid on every version of WatchOS before for the last three years. :(.

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!

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.

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.

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.

This didn't work for me, but I managed to fix it. I downloaded OSX Catalina from Apple Store, run it from logged in Mac. After it reinstalled system I tried to enable "Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac", but it didn't work. So I did the following:

1. Unticked "Require password after sleep or screen saver begins"
2. Clicked "Turn Off Screen lock"
3. Clicked "Keep using Keychain"
4. Next ticked "Require password after sleep or screen saver begins"
5. Ticked "Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac"
6. D O N E ! F I N A L L Y ! ! !

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

Hi stoska992,

This worked like a charm, thank you very much.. was trying for a while now to get it working..

p.s. for users who do not see the Library in their home directory, press: cmd+shift+. (dot) this will show hidden files and directories. Press the combination again to hide them again..

I had the same issue, followed the 'Auto unlock' keychain steps stoska992 provided, logged out on all my devices on iCloud, even reset my Watch to factory settings and set my watch up as new, without avail.

The thing that solved it for me was disabling 'Automatic login' on my Mac.

After trying millions times, my SE finally works.

Here is my solution:

1. Rename the watch on iPhone.
2. Follow the steps listed in previous post - delete the items in KeyChain and Auto Unlock folder.
3. My MBP was finally able to refresh the list of watches it detected. Connect to the watch that was just renamed. This step took me a couple times, first two times failed, but it's working perfectly now.

Hope this could help yours too.