No text tone sounds from Iphone when paired with Apple Watch

I just got an iWatch over the weekend for my birthday. I'm very unhappy with this issue. The sound is not loud enough and the vibrate is not strong enough. My children texted me and I missed that. Looks like i'm going to return the watch this weekend. Both the phone and watch should sound off.

Go into the watch app on your phone and choose settings general and turn off mirror my iPhone for do not disturb. Now when you put your watch on do not disturb, all notifications come through on your phone:) this is what I do when I don't want anything coming through on my watch and just want it all coming through on my phone.

I think I found a reasonable solution.

Anyway. Open you watch app on your iPhone. Then open Notifications>Messages. The default will likely be "Mirror my iPhone". Change that to "Custom", and then turn off Sound.

Now when you get a text, text notifications will only be heard from your phone, but you will still get haptic feedback and and alert will show on the watch. This will only effect Messages, so alarms phone calls, etc will still function as before.

Not the perfect solution, possibly a reasonable workaround until Apple realizes the need to rethink how notifications work.

Hope this helps

<Edited by Host>

In the Watch app on your phone, go to General > Wrist Detection, turn it OFF.

Caveats: This will also disable the ability to lock your watch with a passcode, which in turn disables the ability to unlock your Mac with the watch. It will also disable the tracking of your standing time and automatic heart rate monitoring.

I run mine with wrist detection off and the watch muted. That means I hear custom tones on my phone and get the vibration on my wrist.

Exactly, and another reason this would be useful is that the watch just plays that "chime" regardless of who is texting, whereas on my iPhone, I have custom tones for each contact so I know who's texting without looking at anything.

bhalmi wrote:

I don't think it is by design. I am having the same problem which lead me to this thread - however, my wife still gets text tone alerts on her iphone when paired to her watch.

The determining factor isn't whether the watch is paired to the phone (the watch is going to be paired with the phone most of the time) but whether or not the phone is locked. If the phone is unlocked, you'll get the notifications on the phone. If the phone is locked, the notifications will go to the watch.

Yep I submitted feedback on this. Not apple's greatest idea here. I like both devices to alert, not just the watch. Plus I have many custom tones setup which are now for the most part useless. If I didn't want to hear my phone I'd just put it on silent. We really should have a choice on how this works.

I thought I was going mad until I found this thread. It took me forever to find the CAUSE of what seemed to be random text tones... I finally nailed it down, then found this thread. I have just submitted feedback to Apple and hope that eventually enough people do so to cause them to make a change in the settings. Thank you Meg St Clair and Steve Jobs fan! You are very helpful

Has this problem been fixed yet? I just got a Watch a few days ago and I'm SUPER disappointed about this. I either need to hear the text tone on my phone or the Watch needs to play the same tones as my phone does. I would prefer for both to make a noise though. Also, sometimes I would like to make the watch silent and have my phone on loud so that I'm not drawing attention to my Watch when I'm with people. I just need some options.

Well it seems that my boyfriend just figured it out. If you turn off wrist detection, it makes a sound on both the watch and the phone at the same time. I'm not sure what I'm losing by turning wrist detection off but I'd rather have the sounds. So for anyone who's looking for this option, hopefully it will work for you too.

APPLE! Please fix this!!! This is perhaps the worst idea you have had since iPod socks! We need an ios update immediately to make our phones work like phones again and actually do their job of notifying us when we receive a text. (Yes I have filled out the little form asking Apple to do this. I would just hope that someone from their company also occasionally reads the threads on their own website.)

*** WORKAROUND/CORRECT SETTINGS ***


(Similar to that posted by PamN49, but WITH audio alerts!)


Check me on this, folks, but I was having the exact same PROBLEM (and yes, it is a problem, because if you "mirroring" my phone, you should be doing EXACTLY what my phone is doing - not "mostly" what my phone is doing) and I think I have a "workaround" going successfully and reliably:


1. In your PHONE Settings > Notifications > Messages - set "Repeat Alerts" to at least ONCE.

2. In the WATCH APP > Messages - set to Custom - Set "Repeat Alerts" to NEVER.

Now, assuming you phone is locked, paired to an UNlocked watch: when you get a message with a custom text tone, the FIRST time it comes in, you will NOT hear the custom SMS tone, and your watch will chime. On the first REPEAT of the alert (after 30 seconds or whatever the interval is), because it is set to "never", your watch will remain silent, and the custom text alert tone will sound on your phone. You'll miss the first notification, but not by much. Definitely better than NO custom alerts. Number of custom alerts you hear on your phone will always be the SMS alert repeat value minus one.

I hope this works for all of you experiencing this issue. Good luck!

You will lose a number of functions, but not sure if they are important to you. See this link to the Apple Watch Support, to check out the user Guide and see what functions are disabled when you disable the wrist detection.

http://www.apple.com/support/watch

Because that is the way the forum software is setup. We have nothing to do with it, we are users like you. Apple does not particpate here, so you will not get an answer from them. As indicated elsewhere in this thread, you can provide feedback to Apple at http://www.apple.com/feedback and click on the appropriate subject area.

Since your post is a little vague in the beginning, regarding what the exact issue you have, I'm guessing it has to do with Custom notification sounds. It appears that you are upset that you do not get custom sounds on your watch. Is that the case? It has to do with the fact the watch is not configured with other sounds at this time, but you can suggest that with that link I provided you earlier.