New message notifications do not clear on Apple Watch after reading on iPhone

Like many others, I have a issue with my Apple Watch where SMS messages that are read on my iPhone do not clear the new message notification on the watch. So presently my watch shows I have 21 unread messages, when in reality all of those messages have long since been read on my iPhone.

This renders the message notification feature on my watch useless, as it always shows I have unread messages.

I understand that I can manually clear them on the watch, one by one, but this is tedious and shouldn't be necessary. The notifications on my watch should mirror the notifications on my iPhone.

Apple Watch, watchOS 4

Posted on Jun 5, 2024 2:25 PM

Top-ranking reply

javaliga

Level 10

120,179 points

Posted on Jun 5, 2024 2:44 PM

Assuming on your iPhone you tapped open:

Watch > My Watch > Messages

and selected "Mirror My iPhone" then 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 would 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

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New message notifications do not clear on Apple Watch after reading on iPhone

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