My Apple watch does not connect to wifi when out of Bluetooth range

I have the same question: Same Wi-Fi Network?

Hi!

I had the same problem!

My watch was not connecting to my iphone over wifi. It turns out the watch could not connect to the wifi at all. I have sky broadband here in the uk. But i have turned off the wifi transmitter on the sky hub as I have an apple airport express cabled into the sky router and all my devices connect to the airport express.

A bit of googling implied that the people with similar setups to mine have issues with the wifi of their apple watch.

I decided to turn back on the wifi on my sky router (which is the dhcp server) entered the password and connected to the sky router on my iphone. Opened the apple watch app and waited for a few minutes and hey presto my watch connected to the wifi!

I can see the mac address of the watch on the dhcp table in my sky router, and switching bluetooth off on my iphone now still allows me to ping the phone from the watch!

Downside: I now have two wifi routers switched on and close to each other.

Besides the functions listed above can do other things further away from the phone? i.e. you news, weather apps etc.?

To use wi-fi to pair to your iPhone, you need to do the following:

turn off bluetooth on your iPhone

be on the same wi-if network

The Apple Watch will automatically pair to your iPhone. The apps on your Apple Watch will work with Wi-Fi pairing to your iPhone. I did the above and was able to use my Apple Watch apps including 3rd party apps like CNN, Amazon, etc.

I turned off bluetooth and my Watch immediately said it was disconnected. What am I doing wrong? The Watch does not indicate whether it is connected to wi-fi or not or say which network it is connected to. My phone is connected to my home wifi network.

I could not get my WiFi on the watch to work at all. I contacted apple support and they had me unpair and re-pair my apple watch. I selected "restore from back-up" and now Wi-Fi is working.

Hope this works for others.

Un-pair and re-pair did not work for me.

For the wifi network that your watch can't connect to, go to the iPhone Wifi network page and "forget" that network. Then reconnect to it while the watch is connected to the iPhone via bluetooth. Once the iPhone re-establishes wifi, this password would be passed to the watch.

If you don't re-enter the password for the wifi network, the new Apple Watch won't connect to it.

macfields wrote:

I could not get my WiFi on the watch to work at all. I contacted apple support and they had me unpair and re-pair my apple watch. I selected "restore from back-up" and now Wi-Fi is working.

Hope this works for others.

Thanks heaps! This worked like a charm (I set up as a new Apple Watch though – just to be sure).

This method worked for me too. It was straightforward to do.

Once I reconnected my phone to the wifi network, i was able to turn off the bluetooth on the iPhone and the watch was still able to send messages, and I could dictate to Siri and use the watch remote app to control iTunes on my iMac. Magic!

Worked perfectly ... watch is now on same network as phone when not paired via bluetooth.

Thanks

Mine is working fine now, too. I checked my router and there is the Watch, connected. It only connects to wifi if Bluetooth on the phone is turned off, but it can be useful if, like me,you don't carry you phone round the house with you and the bluetooth range doesn't cover the whole house. Unfortunately, it does not seem to pick up the wifi automatically when you are out of bluetooth range.

I don't know what I did to get it working, I did not disconnect from the network. I just switched off the wifi and bluetooth on the phone, and restarted the phone and Watch, then turned wifi back on again. Worked for me!

Thanks a lot, this helped here too. But had to make sure to re-enter password when reconnecting to my WiFi net. So I had to connect to "other" network when in wifi settings and fill in the network name, encryption type and password, otherwise iPhone would have used password from keychain and that would´t have solved the issue. (Wonder if there´s an easier way? Anyway it worked.)

What I found when my Watch is still connected to the phone via Bluetooth, if I just step out of range but still within the same WiFi network, it doesn't switch over to WiFi automatically. It will just show that the phone cannot be found.

But if, while connected via Bluetooth, I switch off the Bluetooth on my phone, my watch connects to WiFi and it works.

Strange? Anyone having the same issue?

Both my husband's and my watch were not connecting to wifi and we followed the advice in this thread

Re: Apple Watch is not using WiFi ?

which involved a process of forgetting the home network on the phone, turning off the watch, temporarily reconfiguring our home network to 2.4Ghz, reconnecting the phone to the network, and powering the watch back on and waiting for it to connect completely with the phone. Then testing, and when all was working, configuring the router back to 5Ghz.

This solved our problems, both our watches now are using wifi when bluetooth is off on the phones.