Iphone 8 will not pair with Apple Watch 4

That is actually so stupid. I just ordered an Apple Watch 9 and I have an iPhone 8. I guess I won’t be able to use it. How dumb.

Extremely non-trivial.

The only way is for Apple to do it. You would have to go to an Apple Store and see about sending your Apple Watch to Apple in order to have an older watchOS version installed.

And I cannot say for sure if they would do it.

It is a 6 year old device, as it was first released September 2017.

watchOS 10 needs needs an iPhone running iOS 17, and iOS 17 needs an iPhone Xs or newer.

Technology moves fast, and advances such that older devices do not have the power needed to run the latest software.

You should see if Apple will downgrade the Apple Watch Series 4 to watchOS 9, then you can use it with your iPhone 8.

gleng1962 wrote:

Hi Bob, I have done a bit of searching on this issue, and it seems that there are a lot of ****** off people complaining about the same issue. Are Apple likely to listen to the people and reverse a bad decision or just ignore us?

Since iPhone Xs is the oldest iPhone that support iOS 17 and Apple Watch watchOS 10 is the current watch release, I am guessing that the iPhone 8 is too old and does not have sufficient RAM to support iOS 17.

So chances are Apple is not going to suddenly make iOS 17 work on the iPhone 8.

As for complaints, chances are it is far less than the 1.8 billion iPhone users, and that is the population Apple is working to keep happy. And keeping them happy means new features, or they are going to wonder off to an Android product.

But I am just a user like you. I do not have any say in Apple operating system decisions.

If the Apple Watch is running watchOS 10, then it requires an iPhone running iOS 17. And iOS 17 requires an iPhone XS or newer.