Handoff wont work

i went back to the manual and noticed that it says the icon appears on your lock screen when the watch is close to the phone. i don't know how close they mean exactly. with the phone sitting within 2 feet, i tested it to do a web search, make a note, and set an alert for find my friends, all things i know the watch can't do natively. with the phone sitting right next to me, it works. as others have said, handoff does not work where you can pick up in the middle of a message that hasn't been sent yet and continue. once the message has been sent, you can access it on all the devices and continue the conversation, the same as before the watch came into play. when i ask the watch to send an email and try to include the subject line, handoff doesn't appear on my phone. when i ask the watch simply to send an email for me, the handoff appears. i'm still figuring it out, too, but see if yu can do some of the things that worked for me.

The only time I see the handoff symbol on my phone is if I open the particular app on my watch then go to the phone, i.e. if I open Messages on the Watch and then go to the lock screen on the phone the messages icon is at the bottom left. Same with Mail and others that work with Handoff. But if I open an message or mail from notifications it does not show up in Handoff.

I was having the exact same problem. I fixed it by simply powering off the apple watch and turning it on again, Handoff now works for all apps.

Steps I took:

1. Logged out of iCloud on iPhone and logged back in (didn't fix)
2. Restarted watch (didn't fix)
3. Restarted phone (didn't fix)
4. Disabled Wi-Fi on phone (fixed!)
5. Enabled Wi-Fi on phone (still fixed)

It's entirely possible that disabling Wi-Fi was co-incidental and it just took a while after the reboot to work but it's worth a shot. I have an older 2010 MacBook Air that doesn't support handoff and older Airport Extreme and Airport Express base stations. It's possible one of those was interfering and I needed to get off my local network to clear something out.

UPDATE: Now Handoff is intermittently working. Disabling of Wi-Fi does not seem to immediately solve the issue.

I'm curious if folks are running Yosemite and having this problems and if "discoveryd" might have some role to play. http://www.imore.com/still-plugging-leaks-os-x-yosemite-boat-problem-discoveryd I'm on 10.10.3 and Apple watch 1.0 and can't receive or make calls from the watch, and I've noticed that approximately 40% of notifications are delayed. I haven't yet started tracking what wireless networks I'm on. Somehow I thought all that syncing happened over bluetooth. Keen on learning how to fix.

Yes, 10.10.3. discoveryd is certainly a possibility from what I've heard. Will research possible fixes that might be related.

Instead of disabling wifi, have you tried actually disabling bluetooth instead? If you're on a stable wifi connection, you can do everything just as well as over wifi as you could with bluetooth -- but without the horrible, nightmarish, unpredictable, confusing, and painfully intermittent bluetooth connection problems that plague everyone using iPhones and other Apple products.

So, try a very simple experiment for me, please: leaving everything else as you have it, making sure your iPhone is nicely connected to wifi (i.e., while at home on your couch), simply slide the control panel up from the bottom of your locked iPhone. Click the bluetooth icon so it goes off (or turn bluetooth off in the settings panel on your iPhone).

Then wait about 10 seconds to make sure the watch is now using wifi. Test various features of the watch -- you'll see they all still work (Siri, receiving/making phone calls with your watch, getting notifications, etc.). Now, once you see the light (that everything still works great without bluetooth, that evil and horrible nightmare of a broken Apple stack), I bet magically you'll notice non-intermittent 100% perfect "handoff' functionality. (At least, insofar as handoff is ever functional.)

Please let us know if that fixes it for you. I'd be really curious. I think this is a big issue and everyone needs to understand how broken bluetooth is, and stop using it except when roaming outside home or office where you have a stable connection to wifi.

Steve

How have I missed the fact that I'm having these terrible Bluetooth problems with all my Apple products? Thank your for pointing that out to me.

Fair enough, I'm being hyperbolic. But I am not being facetious -- seriously, have you (or others) tested just turning off bluetooth while on wifi, to see if the problem remains?

All the troubleshooting steps listed in this thread involve the assumption that bluetooth is working, but maybe needs to be kicked (by turning off, then back on), etc. But nobody is trying the obvious and entirely reasonable approach: disable bluetooth and just use wifi connectivity for a while, to see if that fixes the problem. Maybe I'm wrong, but so far as I've been using my watch over wifi with bluetooth turned off -- except for the irksome warning that constantly pops up in the Apple Watch iOS app -- I have had a joyous two nights now of fully functional watch/iPhone syncing and zero delays and other problems. (Though yes, there are still many, many bugs. So it may not be the problem here -- but certainly worth a shot, no? I mean, my instructions are really simple: just turn off bluetooth and see if it's better.)

Steve

Not having a problem with it so no I haven't tried it.

Appreciate the suggestion. When I turned off bluetooth on my phone it said Apple watch uses bluetooth for notifications and connecting to Apple Watch. Are you sure you want to turn it off, or something to that effect. I still tried turning it off and making a call with the watch. Call failed.

wierd but this helped me.

sign out and sign back in to iCloud

Apoc_reg, I suggested back on May 5th that you turn Handoff on on the iPhone. Regardless, would you mind marking this as resolved now that you have worked it out?

Cheers.