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Apple Watch 6 sometimes not receiving notifications

My Apple Watch Series 6 is sometimes not receiving notifications. It seems random (although certainly it is not). iPhone is original SE, iOS 14.2.


I have checked all settings to be sure Notification is turned on, have restarted both the watch and my iphone.

Posted on Dec 3, 2020 3:20 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 9, 2020 9:09 AM

I believe I have solved this problem! (At least I have not missed a notification on my watch since I made the changes)

What I found is that my Settings across all my iOS devices were not consistent; in particular I recently bought a new iPad Mini (and I never seem to let go of the old devices, so I have iPhone SE (original), new and old iPad minis, and an ancient iPad.

I noticed that my iPad mini had "grabbed" a text even though it was in Lock mode (and neither my watch nor iphone received that text). So I poked around at settings to look for inconsistencies.

SETTINGS --> MESSAGES --> (and I went through all settings here for all my devices)

Inconsistencies for me were

"Start New From" -- all devices other than my new Mini had my @me.com account there; the new Mini had my cell phone number. I changed this to match the other devices and have not had a problem since!

"Send/Receive" -- I also noticed my old iPad didn't have all 4 options changed so I changed that to be consistent (not good practice to change more than one thing at once, muddies the process, but I couldn't resist)

ANYWAY - perhaps this may help someone else having similar problems.

5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 9, 2020 9:09 AM in response to DianeX

I believe I have solved this problem! (At least I have not missed a notification on my watch since I made the changes)

What I found is that my Settings across all my iOS devices were not consistent; in particular I recently bought a new iPad Mini (and I never seem to let go of the old devices, so I have iPhone SE (original), new and old iPad minis, and an ancient iPad.

I noticed that my iPad mini had "grabbed" a text even though it was in Lock mode (and neither my watch nor iphone received that text). So I poked around at settings to look for inconsistencies.

SETTINGS --> MESSAGES --> (and I went through all settings here for all my devices)

Inconsistencies for me were

"Start New From" -- all devices other than my new Mini had my @me.com account there; the new Mini had my cell phone number. I changed this to match the other devices and have not had a problem since!

"Send/Receive" -- I also noticed my old iPad didn't have all 4 options changed so I changed that to be consistent (not good practice to change more than one thing at once, muddies the process, but I couldn't resist)

ANYWAY - perhaps this may help someone else having similar problems.

Dec 12, 2020 12:17 PM in response to DianeX

DianeX wrote:

My Apple Watch Series 6 is sometimes not receiving notifications. It seems random (although certainly it is not). iPhone is original SE, iOS 14.2.

I have checked all settings to be sure Notification is turned on, have restarted both the watch and my iphone.

After much study and testing, turns out the Notification problem originates with the iPhone iOS 14. There are a lot of posts and an ongoing thread on this in the iphone Community - one in particular with over 100,000 views iOS 14 text notification issues - Apple Community

Dec 22, 2020 11:30 AM in response to DianeX

DianeX wrote:

My Apple Watch Series 6 is sometimes not receiving notifications. It seems random (although certainly it is not). iPhone is original SE, iOS 14.2.

I have checked all settings to be sure Notification is turned on, have restarted both the watch and my iphone.

Updating to reflect my conclusion that this is not an Apple Watch problem at all, but the problem originates with the iPhone - since my iPhone itself is experiencing Notification problems (since updated to iOS 14.3 and still has the issue). If iPhone isn't handling Notifications properly, then of course they won't get to the watch either.

Apple Watch 6 sometimes not receiving notifications

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