Unlock with Apple Watch not working after updating to Monterey and WatchOS 8.1

I managed to fix this issue without repairing my watch. Steps were:

• Open settings, privacy & security, general and uncheck open with apple watch.
• Open Keychain Access, under View menu make sure 'show hidden items' is enabled.
• Search for 'auto unlock' select all the auto unlock entries, right click and delete them.
• Search for 'autounlock' select all the autounlock entries, right click and delete them (some will instantly reappear).
• Restarted Mac.
• Open settings, privacy & security, general - then make sure your apple watch is unlocked and your iphone is unlocked and both near the mac. Then check open with apple watch.

Sorted!

Tried almost all steps mentioned everywhere I googled out. wasted hours. It didn't solve my problem. Then, a small change made to my screen saver settings, the problem is gone!!!!!

I noticed a light orange triangle sign next to "show screen saver after ?? minutes" (system preference -- desktop & screen saver). The warning tell me the screen saver starts after the monitor is off for saving power. So I went to (system preference -- Battery-- power adapter ) and increase the time "turn display off after" to be shorter than screen saver start time. Then the light orange triangle warning sign is gone.

well, I tried to set up "unlock with Apple Watch...". It works!!!!!!!!!!!

Steezey's fix is what ultimately worked for me. I tried everything else until I found this.

• Open settings, privacy & security, general and uncheck open with apple watch.
• Open Keychain Access, under View menu make sure 'show hidden items' is enabled.
• Search for 'auto unlock' select all the auto unlock entries, right click and delete them.
• Search for 'autounlock' select all the autounlock entries, right click and delete them (some will instantly reappear).
• Restarted Mac.
• Open settings, privacy & security, general - then make sure your apple watch is unlocked and your iphone is unlocked and both near the mac. Then check open with apple watch.

I tried everything listed in this forum but nothing worked for me until I looked at the FaceTime preferences on the Mac. It looks like SharePlay is enabled by default. I turned this off and the auto unlocking started working for me. However, the way you unlock also matters, press enter on keyboard seems to make the unlocking consistent and move your mouse will not unlock.

Called AppleCare. This worked:

1. Install iOS 15.1 on your iPhone.
2. In iPhone’s Watch app go to Settings -> General -> Reset.
3. Re-pair the Apple Watch with your iPhone and install Watch OS 8.1.
4. Now you can set up “unlock with Apple Watch” on your Mac. It will unlock your computer every time - not just most of the time like it used to.

Salutations wforan3, 

We understand that you’re not able to unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch. Sounds like you’ve done some great troubleshooting already. 

Are you encountering any error messages along the way when attempting to unlock your Mac? If so, what does the message say? 

Thanks. 

This exactly! Unlock with Apple Watch works once, then never again with macOS Monterey. I have tried everything, all hardware has the latest OS installed, and it still doesn't work properly - unlocks once, then stops working. This is with an M1 MacBook Pro, so it doesn't work with even Apple's own chip! Worked perfectly with macOS Big Sur.

Hello,

Same here. Auto-unlock stopped working after the Monterey upgrade. In a way it's good to see I am not alone :-)

Wifi is enabled on both devices, watch has Bluetooth enabled.

Restarted Watch, rebooted Mac, etc.

When I try to enable the Auto-unlock in the settings I get error message "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch." after several minutes. It worked fine with Big Sur.

Regards.

No tried all tricks I was able to find on the internet but can't get this thing to work.

Did a clean install of Monterey and transferred my data and config via Migration Assistent from a Time Machine Backup.

Last resort would be unpairing my watch but I do not want to make this effort now with unclear outcome.

Unlock with watch worked fine until I upgraded from Big Sur to Monterey 12.1 this weekend.

Neither Steezey's solution of removing the Keychain entries nor re-pairing my Apple watch made a difference in this particular issue, although re-pairing did fix some issues I didn't realize I was experiencing. Going back to Security & Privacy, I do have the option of checking the box, but it hangs at "Turning on..." for several minutes before "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch."

This is why whenever there is a new major OS release I hold off for months. I'm experiencing so many strange bugs with this update and it's driving me crazy.

All in all the "Unlock with Apple watch"-feature behaves very erratically - sporadically it does not work anymore and i have to re-enable it in the MacOS preferences - even if the box is still ticked. Sometimes i have to reset the watch - which i consider to be a waste of time - in other cases I need to disable and re-enable it in the MacOS private settings. Last time MacOS could not connect to the watch on several trials - some hours later I could tick the preference tickbox without problem - even without having my phone close to the Mac. Yay! But still frustrating.

Likewise with the iPhone feature that allows the watch to unlock the phone when wearing a face mask - sometimes this stops working without obvious cause and needs to be re-enabled in the phone settings.

Let's hope that Apple will address these annoyances since most people have better things to do than to spend hours on this "feature-fixing". Once it works it should continue to work flawlessly and reliably.

I am using Catalina. But it only works 30% of the time.

It will go for a couple weeks then suddenly it works for a day or so and then not working again for weeks? What is the issue with this inconsistency?

Mine works now but is a bit quirky even after the fix above. Auto Unlock won’t work if the wake action is a mouse/trackpad movement, but it will if it is awakened by a keyboard keypress. However, it will often want a password on the first attempt. I hit escape to cancel the password request, and then I hit a random key on the keyboard and Auto Unlock works.

Hi,

After unpairing/reconnecting the watch it was working again - now let's see if it remains stable.

I unpaired my Apple Watch 3 and repaired it, but my Mac still can't communicate with the watch to turn on the unlock-mac-with-watch feature.