For whatever it's worth, I think this will help those of you who use certain third party APPs on your Apple Watch as much as I do. After reviewing the American Airlines APP on iTunes (which never worked on my Apple Watch), I decided I would check the United Airlines APP to see if it worked. It didn’t! That’s when I figured that it was an iOS problem and not an APP problem. I fly over 120K miles a year with American and use the APP at least five times a week. It worked fine on my iPhone 6S but wouldn’t load on my Apple Watch. After re-pairing the phone and watch, uninstalling and reinstalling the APP, restoring the iPhone, and erasing the watch, the APP still wouldn't work. I made an appointment at the genius bar where they wiped the phone (erase all content and settings) and set it up as a NEW phone. That is a pain! Why was that necessary? Because I backed up my iPhones for years. Not since 2011 have I set up a new phone as a new phone. I always restored from a backup, which is why my newest phone carried bugs from previous backups and versions that prevented the APP from working on the Apple Watch. So setting up the phone as a NEW phone, as much of a pain as it is, fixed the problem. As a result, all my third party APPs now work on the Apple Watch. Problem fixed! I would STRONGLY suggest that you make sure all your photos are loaded into your Photo Library on your computer and all your important text messages are forwarded to an email. Make sure you have additional copies of your important information saved off of the phone (computer, cloud or backup HD). Also, when you plug in your phone to iTunes after setting it up as a New Phone, make sure when iTunes asks you how you want to set it up, click "Set up as New iPhone." After that, you can click sync and your library, photos, and other things will transfer over. Finally, I would erase those third party APPs from your iTunes and redownload them before you click sync. That's what worked for me. Also, remember that you'll lose all your information from the APPs (exercise programs, games etc.) that are not cloud based. Good luck.
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Third party app (fix) for Apple Watch users
- Thread starter Frennz
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So to summarise - you have found that if you experience application issues on wOS it is a good measure to set your iPhone up as a NEW installation.
It's frustrating that this is the fix since starting fresh is always difficult.
Thanks for the advice!
It's frustrating that this is the fix since starting fresh is always difficult.
Thanks for the advice!
I'm glad that worked for you. My iPhone was setup as new just a few weeks before get my the watch. Some apps are fine. Others are not. I don't use the ones that aren't. I think there are a lot of complexities involved with apps not working that go beyond your solution. I think poorly written apps is a big part of it. But thanks for sharing... It's another data point.
Sounds like you ran in to the problem in this older thread https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/native-apps-do-not-load.1919307/