iPhone receiving message notifications before Apple Watch?

I've had this issue. I've also had it where Watch stops receiving notifications completely despite no change in settings.

A reboot seems to fix these (press and hold Digital Crown + Side button for 10+ seconds) although Apple does say you should do a soft reboot by turning the device off then on instead of forcing it to reboot: Restart or reset your Apple Watch - Apple Support

I think I hard to hard reboot once when it froze so I've resorted to doing that ever since but I should probably use the first method when possible.

What's annoying is that going into settings on either Watch of the Watch app and turning notifications off then back on doesn't re-trigger/reset them 😟

I've found my Watch is significantly happier with a reboot every couple days...

The "normal" way for notifications and text messages (basically everything except actual phone calls) is if the paired iPhone is locked, the notifications/messages should only go to the Watch. If the iPhone is unlocked and on, then they are supposed to only go to the iPhone itself. (Again, phone calls go to both.)

Having said that - and having seen that activity for the first week I had my Watch, this morning I got two Messages while my phone was sleeping/locked that after a few seconds were repeated on my Watch. But later on today, the behavior went back to the way it was before (Watch if iPhone is sleeping/locked).

I have experienced the same problem. Notifications for Messages go to my phone first (even though the phone is locked) and a few seconds later, they go to my Apple Watch. The first time this happened, I restored the watch back to factory settings and the issue was fixed. However, after a couple of weeks, it is happening again. I tried unpairing the watch the iPhone last night and re-pairing it. That fixed the problem but today, the notifications are going to the iPhone first again.

AS I said in my earlier response, I had this behavior for the past few days. And today I got a notification from the ESPN app on my locked iPhone that did not go to the Watch at all.

SO I called Apple support and she had me unpair the Watch from my iPhone (after telling her that I did several resets already). Did that - sort of a pain because she also did not allow me to restore from a backup and i had to do all my apps and settings all over again. But it seemed to solve the problem - at a least for now. Have to see if it comes back again - then she said they would have to replace the Watch.

This happened to me today also . I called  care and they also had me unpair and set up the watch again .

This morning as I had no carrier coverage ,I had done a hard reset . Actually , that is the problem ! If you do a hard reset , notifications will go to your phone first . A normal reset ( just turn the phone off and back on ) will not cause that issue .

I tried both afterwards to make sure and sure enough ! It was a headache resetting my watch twice but at least now I know ;-)))

I hope this will help others .

On another forum I read this :

MESSAGE NOTIFICATIONS FIXE

Go to settings -> notifications -> messages, then turn if off and back on again. this will fix the problem. make sure you are going to the actual settings on your iPhone, and not the apple watch app.

I haven't tried it but will if this happens again ..re pairing is a pain in the elbow ;-)

Yes, please do that. On the phone's Settings/Notifications/ Messages just toggle Allow Notifications off and then back on. That will restore the proper function and is very simple to do. But it will occur again. So many people are un-pairing the watch but that's essentially the nuclear option. It will fix it - temporarily. But it will come back and you've lost your Apple Pay data, any synced music playlist and motion calibration. Plus you risk something going wrong if you're doing this frequently. It should only be done for a major issue. The Messages issue was the big bug that came with that software update and hopefully will be fixed in the next one. But for now toggling that setting is quick and simple. And restarting the phone and watch occasionally will help as well.

This is the second time I've had this problem. The re-toggling of the iPhone's messages notifications DOES work. The first time I had to re-pair as well, but lucky I stumbled across this post. Hopefully they fix this issue cause it's annoying as ****!

I have experienced the same issues everyone else here has with messages alerting on Watch after iPhone. All other notification preform as they should and I have had no issues (if iPhone is locked they alert on my watch not my iPhone). But I can confirm for me at least that if you do a hard reboot on the watch you can not get alerts (all of them) to function as they should and have to do a re-pair. This can even be done restoring your backup of watch and notifications function normally. But after a couple weeks messages will stop notifying the watch first and always hit the phone first (but all my other notifications work correctly, haven't seen an issue with anything else but messages). Lungtas's fix by going into the iPhone settings (not apple watch app) and simply turning off messaging notifications and then back on immediately fixes the problem without any reboots of any kind. As soon as the problem happens again all you simply have to do is that procedure again. I hope Apple fixes this, I know it is gen 1 hardware and basically gen 1 software so there is bound to be bugs but hopefully this is fixed next release. I highly encourage everyone to report this to www.apple.com/feeback. Fill out the short form then describe your issues as we all have in this forum. Surely their engineers wearing the device are seeing it too.

I'm afraid it doesn't work each time 😕 . The same problem happened today and the only thing that fixed it for now is turning off and then back on my phone .

NOT a hard reboot .

I really hope they will fixe this in a future update !

Well at least it can be fixed for the moment without having to pair the watch yet another time ...

In version 2.x (currently beta), it will not only vibrate but ring / beep to notify you. The use of the speakers on the watch are enabled. Most of your issues will probably get resolved in the new version. Also note that since the watch works via bluetooth, there is no way that the phone will be able to make the watch ring at the exact same time. In fact the phone will always be a second or two ahead of the watch. I do not believe a software patch will make this work. There is generally always at least a second difference between devices, this increases to nearly 3 seconds if you have HANDOFF enabled since it will communicate with all your other devices over WIFI network too such as your iPad or Macbook, etc. There is clearly no solution that I see since again via the wifi network communication still takes a second or three.

Also make sure you do not have Do Not Disturb activated anywhere or your phone notifications sent to off.

You are allowed to either MIRROR the iPhone (same notification settings on the phone mirror to the watch)

OR

You can manually decided the notification of your phone.

Not sure if this helps in anyway.

Thanks!

I really appreciate your comprehensive answer and poss. solutions

Shutting off the HANDOFF feature did the trick.(I do not use Mac or iPad devices)

I gained 2 more seconds of watch ring time (enough to screen and answer the watch w/o missing calls)

Annoyingly this bug appeared for me after the iOS 8.4 update. Been messing around with all sorts of settings but toggling message notifications off and then on again on the phone is the only fix that's worked for me so far. I'll see how long it lasts.

I had the same problem. Soft and hard reset on watch and phone did nothing. The only thing that fixed it was to unpair the watch and then pair it again.