Restoring the Lullaby sound (temporary fix)

There are several posts here (and also on Reddit) asking why the Watch's Lullaby sound (which plays at the wind down time before Sleep Focus turns on) stops playing, or plays inconsistently, etc., and how to fix it.

I have been testing various scenarios for this for a few weeks now & it seems to be related to alarms & timers not playing on the Watch, either. I suspect it’s some sort of intermittent issue with communication between the Watch & the iPhone, although alerts & notifications continue to work even when alarms, timers, & the lullaby do not.

I believe I have found a (temporary) fix for the issue when it happens. I am posting it here so that future searchers might find it useful.

On the iPhone, go into the Watch app, scroll down to Clock, and turn OFF “Push Alerts from iPhone”. Close the Watch app, then reboot the Watch. After the Watch has restarted, go back into the Watch app on the iPhone, scroll down to Clock, and turn “Push Alerts from iPhone” back ON.

Note: this does NOT stop the situation from happening, it just makes alarms, timers, & the Lullaby play again as they should. (at least, they do until whatever the intermittent communication issue is happens again.)

If you notice alarms or timers set on the iPhone not playing on the Watch, this will restore them. I've also confirmed this works if an alarm is snoozed -- it will play on the Watch at the next 9-minute time.

Of course, as soon as I wrote this all out, I see there’s an update to WatchOS (to 10.3.1). Hopefully that will fix the issue for good & nobody will need to use this temporary fix. I’ll report back later if it continues to happen after the update or not.

iPhone 15 Pro iOS 17.3

Apple Watch Ultra 2 WatchOS 10.3