Synchronizing Apple Watch Sleep alarms with iPhone

I have (2) Apple Watches connected to the same iPhone. I use the Sleep | Wake Up alarm feature on the iPhone as my daily alarm. Over the past months I've been frustrated with what feels like random synchronization between the three devices. I've experienced times where I've stopped the alarm on my phone and it stopped it (as expected) on the watches, where I've stopped it on the phone and it does NOT stop it on one of the watches, and where it changes which watch is synced to the phone and thus, goes off. I've tried to figure out the logic, but am struggling and frankly, I don't understand the implemented behavior. My expectation would be that after setting up the alarm, that all (3) devices would go off OR that I be allowed to configure which of the (3), possibly one, two or all three, go off. If I hit snooze or stop on any of the (3), that the rest automatically snooze as well. Today, I have to snooze BOTH the phone and one of the watches (the other doesn't seem to acknowledge the alarm). If the alarm goes off, I have to stop BOTH the phone and the watch. What often happens is that I'm in the middle of a snooze and decide to wake up. It's easy to stop the alarm on my phone, but I leave the bedside where the watch is and I have to open the watch and make sure to also stop it there, or it will go off in some minutes.


I'm not sure why this behavior is so complicated and not synchronized. It seems odd for Apple to implement in this manner and I wish the behavior could be simplified and synchronized to alleviate these frustrations.


Thank you and hopefully, there will be an update in a future iOS and WatchOS!

Apple Watch Series 3, watchOS 8

Posted on Jan 17, 2023 11:04 AM

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Jan 17, 2023 12:23 PM in response to HawksPerch

Are all watches series 3 and running watchOS 8 according to your tag? What iOS is on your iPhone?


The first (and simplest) thing to try if something isn’t working right is to restart your Apple Watch and its paired iPhone. If necessary (device not responding), try a forced restart. Both methods can be found here:

How to restart your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Restart your iPhone - Apple Support


If that doesn't help, the next steps might be to unpair and pair your watch again and restore from the backup just created. This should result in no loss of data. It deletes all temp and corrupted files and re-indexes the file system.

Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Set up your Apple Watch - Apple Support


This is a user-top-user forum. Even if we knew Apple's future plans, we cannot discuss them in this forum. You can make this known to Apple using this link:

Product Feedback - Apple



This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Synchronizing Apple Watch Sleep alarms with iPhone

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