Apple Watch Find My “Play Sound” may fail after an automatic watchOS update 26.6

I have an iWatch Ultra 3 MF1H4LW/A A3281. I recommend (with AppleCare agreeing) to turn off auto updates. This has been reported.

i ran into this scenario several days ago after my Watch did an automatic OS update to 26.6 while I was not wearing i

I couldn’t find my watch in the house. FindMy could see the watch and showed it was at home. If I left the house, FindMy even showed that I was moving away from it.

I tried Play Sound more than two dozen times from my iPhone, iPad, and iCloud. All three could see the watch.

Each time:

• The Play Sound button was active.
• Directions was grayed out.
• After pressing Play Sound, it appeared to be trying for approximately 10 seconds, then stopped.
• There was no error or indication that the sound couldn’t be played.
• The watch never made a sound.

After a day of looking and trying I called AppleCare and we went through the troubleshooting steps with the same results.

While still on the phone, I happened to find the watch visually.

This is when we discovered the problem.

The watch was fully charged and its display was active, but the screen was waiting for me to acknowledge that an automatic watchOS update had completed.

I acknowledged the update and returned to the normal watch screen. We immediately tried Play Sound again.

It worked immediately.

So Find My was apparently still able to communicate with the watch and determine its location, but the watch would not execute the Play Sound command while it was waiting for the post-update acknowledgement.

More importantly, FindMy gave no indication that this was happening. It simply attempted Play Sound for about 10 seconds and stopped.

This creates a catch-22: I needed Find My to make the watch play a sound so I could find it, but the watch apparently needed me to physically find it and acknowledge the update before FindMy could make it play a sound.

AppleCare was on the phone with me when we discovered this behavior.

Until Apple addresses this, users who depend on Find lMy to locate their Apple Watch may want to consider disabling automatic watchOS updates.

Hopefully this helps someone else who can see their Apple Watch in Find My but can’t get Play Sound to work after an update.