Apple Watch 7 keeps freezing and crashing

[mattym42089]

My friends replacement series 7 watch keeps freezing on a time and then will crash with a spinning wheel around the clock icon. It’s on the latest software and it still keeps happening. I say replacement Watch because this was happening on the old watch and none of the troubleshooting fixed it so they sent a new one.

Hopefully someone else has had the issue and can help.

 

[mattym42089]

I will add that the old and new watch were setup as new watches.

Some other details.

He has auto launch audio apps off because it’s super annoying.

Always on display is off because we both found it to be making our watches die faster.

His old series 7 was fine with them but this one doesn’t seem to be playing nice with his tattoos. It kept locking so he had to turn his passcode off like he did on his old series 4.

 

[BugeyeSTI]

Not sure about the freezing and restarting issue but in the picture you've provided the band looks way too loose to get good readings. Should be snug but not uncomfortable or readings are sporadic and fail often in my experience... I've also have heard tattoos seem to effect readings but I wouldn't think wrist detection would be affected

 

[mattym42089]

Ok so I’ve been playing around trying to duplicate the issue on my watch and I think it is the animated watch faces like Animojis and Disney. When I did the Animoji face my watch froze on the time and I had to hard restart it.

 

[Protocolizable]

I have the exact same problem. The animal memoji faces sometimes crash my watch (brand new S7).

 

[Protocolizable]

Followup on this:

AppleCare replaced my S7 and I continued to get crashing on the animoji watch face.

I used to have an iPhone XR paired with my Apple Watch S7 and would get the animoji watch face crashing, but upon upgrading to an iPhone 13, I no longer have these crashes.

Is it possible it was an issue with my iPhone XR? I don't know, but if anyone else has this problem, perhaps you can try pairing your watch with another phone to see if that has an effect.