I bought my fiancé an apple watch series 5 with LTE for Christmas and she is having trouble sending SMS/MMS messeges from her apple watch. She spoke with apple on the phone and went to an ATT store regarding the issue and I tried to fix it as well. Each time the same procedure was used to try and fix it with success immediately after, even for a few days until it stops again.
What was tried:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208489
When I tried to fix it I added the step of sending SMS messages (with success) before turning iMessege back on, this seemed to fix the watch (at least for a few days until it stopped working again). It was tested with two different android phone numbers
It does not matter how the watch is connected (Bluetooth, LTE, Wifi) it exhibits the same behavior in each state, it will load with that little green bar on the top and stop towards the end and after a long period of time it will say that the message failed to send.
Sending SMS messages from her iPhone works fine (Note that the iPhone was always connected via cellular/bluetooth/wifi during testing). iMessege on the apple watch works fine of course, and even making phone calls to anyone works fine on the apple watch. It just seems to be SMS/MMS.
She asked one of her friends who works at an apple store about it and she told her they've been replacing watches that exhibit this behavior. I don't understand how this could be a hardware issue or even an OS issue, it seems almost like iMessege tries to keep pinging the number without falling back to SMS. If it is a Hardware or OS problem, I guess it could be some priority issue regarding which interface (LTE/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) gets to send out the message?
This issue is very annoying considering this is probably one of the most used features of the watch. If I cannot find help online I'll have to just have her call apple support again for a replacement.
WatchOS Version: 6.1
iOS: 13.1
What was tried:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208489
When I tried to fix it I added the step of sending SMS messages (with success) before turning iMessege back on, this seemed to fix the watch (at least for a few days until it stopped working again). It was tested with two different android phone numbers
It does not matter how the watch is connected (Bluetooth, LTE, Wifi) it exhibits the same behavior in each state, it will load with that little green bar on the top and stop towards the end and after a long period of time it will say that the message failed to send.
Sending SMS messages from her iPhone works fine (Note that the iPhone was always connected via cellular/bluetooth/wifi during testing). iMessege on the apple watch works fine of course, and even making phone calls to anyone works fine on the apple watch. It just seems to be SMS/MMS.
She asked one of her friends who works at an apple store about it and she told her they've been replacing watches that exhibit this behavior. I don't understand how this could be a hardware issue or even an OS issue, it seems almost like iMessege tries to keep pinging the number without falling back to SMS. If it is a Hardware or OS problem, I guess it could be some priority issue regarding which interface (LTE/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth) gets to send out the message?
This issue is very annoying considering this is probably one of the most used features of the watch. If I cannot find help online I'll have to just have her call apple support again for a replacement.
WatchOS Version: 6.1
iOS: 13.1