Apple Watch not marking SMS text as read

Me too! Mine happened when I got the 11 pro max. I have a 3 series watch. It will work for half a day and then go back to not working again. Currently setting at 233 new messages! 😬😬😬 makes me bananas!!!

I’m having the same exact issue! I noticed once I upgrade to the 12 pro. I had the series 4 watch and I thought it was the watch, so I upgraded to the series 6 and the same thing is happening. It’s so frustrating. I have tried everything on this thread and still nothing. There was a new update that came out today. I updated my 12 pro and my watch and still didn’t work. Ugh!!!

Same issue. SMS across all my devices do not get marked as read. I notice it most on the watch since I'm with it all the time but messages on my 2020 iMac running Catalina does the same to all the same SMS messages.

I am also having this problem. i talked to apple support this evening and they told me that they have not had one report of this problem happening. I advise everyone to contact apple support and get a case number. I find it hard to believe that no one has said anything about this problem. Happen for me after upgrading from 11 pro max to 12 pro max. I have found that it has something to do with your user id and icloud. When i signed out of icloud on my phone and of imessage and signed back in it told me that messenger would not work right because i was signed in with two different user names which i wasnt, and it automatically turned messages off in the cloud, when i toggled the switch back on it connected but was doing the same thing as it was. If I turn imessage off it works fine and clears the messages on my watch, turn back on and it messes up again. I have another call back tomorrow with support so i can explain my new findings.

Yea, this is incorrect; I have called Apple about this directly and was on the phone with them for over an hour trying to work through and sort it all out. I even provided this thread to them over the phone and indicated to them that others were experiencing this and not just me. I have an open case with Dustin, who is one of their Senior Technical Advisors, in case you want to reference that on your call tomorrow, so they can connect them together internally. He was very helpful, but there has been no resolution or seemingly any development on having this fixed as of yet.

Interesting to consider the iMessage connection with the user id and iCloud, though. You'd think people internally at Apple would be experiencing this same thing, as I'm confident many of them have the Apple Watch and iPhones both. Also, I've noticed this tends to happen to me mostly in group messages; I don't get it often in one on one conversations.

Oh they know about it. I’ve been having this issue for over a year now. In addition to that my contacts from my phone don’t sync to my iPad but will sync from the iPad to phone. My phone and mini sync and the messages work fine. My issue comes in with my iPad Pro. And the crazy part is that it only does it to non iPhone users, Apple wants to decide who we can text now also.

Thank you! That was the only thing that worked for me after unpairing, re-pairing, setting up as new. None of that worked. But this did! It’s been 3 days and no more issues! Everyone should try this first and save yourself plenty of time!

This was my exact situation, an upgrade to 12 Pro Max. Thank you so much for this. It worked for me, and I also spent hours with tech on this watch for other reasons as well as this and I am thankful that you shared!

F I N A L L Y!!! I found this thread today after searching and trying all the things over and over. This fix corrected the issue with my iPhone 12 and older model apple watch. This is the first time I have purchased the newest iPhone so close to release date. I now recall while I wait a while ... So many apps and issues with functionality like this make it frustrating.

Mikey, it actually worked. I cannot thank you enough. This has almost brought me to leaving Apple all together. This has been MONTHS in despair and hours with apple including an engineer. It's so simple yet actually broke the curse that has haunted many of us. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,

🥲Chrys

Did anyone ever figure this out? Unlike most on this thread, I do NOT have an iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 11--- however, I was with Sprint, and t-mobile sent me a new SIM card, which I installed a couple of days ago. Since then, the SMS messages have not be showing as read on my MacBook Pro, nor my Apple Watch. This happened to me as soon as the SIM card was changed---

All of my devices were running updated software. Adding the watch at Christmas to my devices seemed to be the start of my problems but the deleting my number trick worked like a charm and so far everything is still working as it should. Now don’t get me started on the last macOS software update to Big Sur that almost killed my MacBook Air! Lol

How is Big Sur, I just ordered the new iMac 27 in today, I’m nervous because I do audio engineering and a lot of my equipment and programs are always a year behind on apples updates, I’m still using Catalina for my iMac and have no issues, I hope I don’t have to use Big Sur on the new one, and where did they get that name anyway 😂

Mikey's fix didn't work for me, I ended up disabling iMessage altogether (Settings>Messages>Toggle off "iMessage") then turning it back on and rebooting my watch and after that I haven't had any issues.

I did notice that before I toggled off iMessage it was set to receive on both my phone number and Apple ID, and start new conversations from just my Apple ID. After toggling the setting, it is now set to receive from both, but starts new conversations from my phone number instead of Apple ID. Not sure if that has any relation to the issue at hand, but I will post again if my issue returns!

-Josh

Had the same problem after buying a new watch! It hadn’t occurred to me that the only texts that were left as unread on my watch were from non-Apple phones or automated texts from UPS, FedEx, etc. until I finally found this discussion!

This solution worked for me! Only thing I did differently was turned off my phone, turned off my watch, then turned on my phone then my watch. I hope this sticks because it was driving me CRAZY. Thank you!!