My Apple Watch isn’t unlocking my iPhone

I took it to the Genius Bar. They had me redo the facial recognition process (without a mask) on my phone and now it works.

Hi Mohseen87,

Please see: Unlock your iPhone with Apple Watch when you're wearing a face mask.

Cheers,

Jack

Apple Watch only unlocks iPhone if you are wearing a mask. Otherwise, it will use Face ID. If you have an iPhone with Touch ID, this feature is not supported.

Cheers,

Jack

This is not helpful. Everyone keeps linking to the same page. Like the person who submitted the question, I have followed these instructions like 4 or 5 times and it just won’t work on my iphone. It DOES work on my iMac so I know it isn’t the watch that is the problem, but can’t figure out what is wrong. Would appreciate a suggestion if anyone has figured this out.

Same here, it was working then after 14.5.1 it stopped working. Everything is updated, all the features are turned on as they should be based on the article. I even turned it all off and turned it all back on and still it won’t work.

How can this be an 'Apple recommended' reply when Jack clearly didn't read the post. The author and many others including me know how to set up this feature, have done so and had it work successfully. The issue is it has stopped working recently for no apparent reason. My phone presents the message: "Enter Passcode or Face ID to unlock with Apple Watch" - If I did either of those I would be unlocking WITH Passcode or Face ID and NOT Apple Watch. It would make more sense as a first time after restart message (though should then say "...to enable unlocking with Apple Watch."), but I get this every time - letting the phone lock on display timeout and trying again. (I tried resetting Face ID from scratch as had worked for someone else, but sadly didn't fix for me.)

I have the same issue with a new Watch 6 and a year-old iMac running macOS 11.4. "Unlock with Apple Watch" was working fine until about 3 days ago when it just quit working for both the iMac and my iPhone 11. Have reset Face ID but that didn't fix the problem. Have verified all the settings on the recommended page, and turned Unlock with Apple Watch off, rebooted the iMac, then turned it back on -- same result. Appreciate any advice.