Apple Pay not working after updating it to Watch OS 8

Hello Symthes121.

Thanks for reaching out to Apple Support Communities. We understand that Apple Pay has stopped working since updating watchOS. Apple Pay is a great feature and we will be glad to assist.

You have performed some great troubleshooting. Next, we would recommend reaching out to Apple Support. Contact Apple for support and service

Cheers.

I have the same problem. And the response above doesn’t really help. I’m wondering if we’re missing some new step to activate the card. It used to be that your scroll to the payment method - wait a second or two - and then see the “Hold Near Reader” message. Now we don’t see that - and like Ian, it appears they’ve all stopped working.

Does anyone have advice better than “ask Apple Support?”

I did contact Apple Support. At the end of the day, I was able to solve it by effectively rebuilding the Watch. I unpaired it and then paired it back. Once that happened, the Apple Pay behaviors started working.

Having discussions with the Apple Support folks lead me to the following hypothesis which was my experience. Don't know if this was yours. I had stumbled upon the "AssistiveTouch" new functionality and I tried it out. However, I couldn't really get the hang of it - and more importantly, I couldn't figure out how to get the watch to activate Apple Pay when it was on. So I turned the whole thing off. But as soon as I did that, the watch would NEVER activate the credit cards. I believe that there is a defect in the OS that if you turn this AssistiveTouch thing on, and then turn it off, the OS will not let you use Apple Pay on your credit cards in the watch.

I've submitted this feedback to Apple. Like I said, hard to know if this is something you tried as well or not - but for sure, the act of unpairing and then repairing the watch to the phone worked and I have Apple Pay functionality back on my watch.