Mac not unlocking after watchOS 7 update

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..

That didn't work for me, but thank you anyways. I've reboot my mac, iphone, and apple watch, like everything, it still gives me the same issue.

I have MacBook Pro 2017, iPhone 8+, and Apple Watch SE. All systems are up to date.

My issue is that there are two apple watches showed on my MBP while setting up Auto Unlock, both of them are Apple Watch Series 5, which I never owned in fact. I only have Apple Watch SE which should have been the only watch detected by my MBP. It is very weird that MBP shows I have S5 instead of SE.

Everytime I clicked on the S5 showed on my MBP, it would pop up a window saying that the computer cannot communicate with my Apple Watch.

I have strictly followed the set-up steps. Also, I have unpaired my watch, logged out iCloud on MBP, restarted all the devices etc. None of them seems to help.

This unfortunately did not work. The one thing I noticed is that my phone shows it connected via Bluetooth to my watch, but my watch cannot connect to my phone. The watch connects to other Bluetooth devices (headphones, etc) but will not find my phone. They are right next to each other.

Any thoughts?

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.

Worked perfectly. Thank you! Now if only Apple could fix it so the Typograph and Memoji watch faces make it to my watch. All of the other watch faces transfer just fine. Amazing that they let these updates out the door with such obvious problems.

This is fantastic and worked for me! I had several records on step 7, so I just deleted all of them. So many duplicates! I will say, I had to insert a step: after step 11, I needed to reboot my Mac - step 12 didn't work until I did that. Again, THANK YOU for this! I haven't been able to use Auto Unlock with my watch since the last OS update. This is great!!

Thank you! Worked great. In my case, I needed to restart. Unlock failed after following those steps with the same error 'Unable to communicate with your Apple Watch...' Restarting as a final step solved the problem and now it works great. Good work figuring this out!

Success with these directions with one additional check--your network settings.

I just bought a new I-Watch SE and had the same problem on my laptop 2016 and IMAC 2020. I updated the I-Watch to 7.0.1 with no success. I did a screen share with a second level support with Apple while he looked on to the instructions above. I was told that engineering was working on a fix when it didn't work.

After getting off the phone, I saw that I was not on the exact same network with computer and iPhone. When the networks were the same AND I followed the above directions, I was able to get both computers to unlock with Series 1 Watch and I-Watch SE (Series 5). The older watch was still running 6.2.8 with no difficulties. The problem is with 7.0 and 7.01. Hopefully the engineering fixes will make this easier for the future....

IMAC 2020-Running Catalina 10.15.7 iPhone 11 IOS 14, Watch 7.0.1-Worked initially but then reverted to unchecked permissions.

I was able to get it the steps above to work on my iMac 202 initially. After a few hours, the Security Permissions were gone and would not reset. It lost the settings and reverted to the old behavior. Possibly T2 Chip and added encryption make a difference? Not sure... Bummer.

MacAir 2016-Running Catalina 10.15.7 iPhone 11 IOS 14, Watch 7.0.1-Worked!

On my MacAir it did work and still is working! Not sure whether it has something to do with T2 chip or other features on the 2020 iMac?

Yeah, same here, works a few times then stops. Even upgraded to 10.15.7 from 10.14 to see if that would fix it but it didn’t last. I’ve not tried it on Big Sur but that may be my next step with a newer Beta > 9.

THANK YOU!

I'd just about given up. The I went to the Keychain and did the search for Auto Unlock and it came up blank. I toggled Handoff on all devices and restarts on all of them, then I went back to the Keychain. This time the files came up when I searched for Auto Unlock and AutoUnlock.

Unlock my Mac with iWatch worked after the second attempt.

Totally worked just like you said. First try failed quickly — it usually takes 30 seconds or so to fail, so right away I knew something felt different. Clicked it again and it worked!

Thank you so much.

It worked, but it seemed to need time to "think" about it. The only difference in what I did was to restart my MacBook Air and while it was rebooting I walked to the other side of the house. So, either the restart worked, walking to the other side of the house or a combination of all of the above!

I was concerned at how fast Watch OS7 was chewing through battery life, so followed some advice to unpair and re-pair the watch. Ended up having to reset it as well. Since then, no auto unlocking with the watch (although it was fine this morning before I did the unpair/re-pair). Followed these instructions and I'm still no better off. I've tried all the other suggestions I've come across on this thread to no avail. It stubbornly refuses to allow my watch to wake up my Macbook Air.

Watch 5, Watch OS 7.01, Catalina 10.15.7 and iPhone XS Max running iOS 14.0.1. All help gratefully received!

I must have tried 100 times before it finally worked. I thought, this is the definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Just when I was about to give up, I tried again and poof. It worked.

I think it finally worked when I toggled my keychain off in iCloud, restarted computer, then toggled it back on. (After taking the steps of deleting all the auto locks everywhere.)

I have a MacBook Pro and and an iMac. I think I should have started with the iMac then moved to my MacBook Pro.