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Unpaired watch, still has activation lock?

B

blackjackmark

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 19, 2010
501
205
I unpaired my series 5 from my phone at home and prepared it for sale. Got a buyer for it and went to meet them at Starbucks. When I met the buyer, they asked if the activation lock was removed. I said, of course, it’s ready to pair, so it has to have had the activation lock removed. Well, guess what, it wasn’t. Sure enough, she was right. she tried to pair to her phone and the Activation Lock Screen popped up. When I looked at My Devices, it was still listed as attached to my Apple ID account!

per this support article, all one has to do is unpair from the phone, and that also releases it from your Apple ID, yet that didn’t work.

About Activation Lock on your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Activation Lock is designed to prevent anyone else from using your Apple Watch if it's ever lost or stolen.
support.apple.com support.apple.com

So I logged into my Apple ID and I deleted it from my Apple account. However, I STILL had to enter My Apple ID and password into the buyers iphone to get it to pair. Once done, then we confirmed it was tied to her Apple ID and all was well. (Since the watch wasn’t a cellular model, I’m assuming this step was necessary since the watch had no way of knowing that I had deleted it from my Apple account).

Any ideas why the watch remained attached to my Apple ID, even though it was no longer paired to my iPhone?!?
 
Certainly seems like something went wrong in the unpairing process. It is possible to unpair the watch from your phone without the watch present, so that would definitely leave activation lock enabled on the watch, however, that also wouldn’t leave the watch in a ready to pair state. You can also reset the watch (Settings, General, Reset, Erase all content and settings) and that would put the watch back in a ready to pair state without disabling activation lock. However, from your description it sounds like that’s not what happened.

As far as the activation, The watch would use the phone’s internet connection to check the activation lock status when you are trying to pair with the phone, so just because it’s not a cellular watch doesn’t mean that you can’t disable activation lock by removing it from your Apple account. I suspect that it may just take a few minutes for that to process and you may not have waited long enough before retrying.

Definitely odd though as unpairing it should remove activation lock.
 
Same thing happened to me. Unpaired successfully and went to pair with someone else and was activation locked. Pissed me off!
 
Saw this a couple of days ago preparing an Apple Watch for resale. It’s a good thing I double checked. I think it was because I un-paired while the watch was off. I’m nervous now though because I sold another watch that I didn’t double check. I hope it is unlocked or it is going to be a hassle.
 
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BrettDS said:
Certainly seems like something went wrong in the unpairing process. It is possible to unpair the watch from your phone without the watch present, so that would definitely leave activation lock enabled on the watch, however, that also wouldn’t leave the watch in a ready to pair state. You can also reset the watch (Settings, General, Reset, Erase all content and settings) and that would put the watch back in a ready to pair state without disabling activation lock. However, from your description it sounds like that’s not what happened.

As far as the activation, The watch would use the phone’s internet connection to check the activation lock status when you are trying to pair with the phone, so just because it’s not a cellular watch doesn’t mean that you can’t disable activation lock by removing it from your Apple account. I suspect that it may just take a few minutes for that to process and you may not have waited long enough before retrying.

Definitely odd though as unpairing it should remove activation lock.
Click to expand...
Watch was unpaired for a full day prior to the attempt to sell it. And it was unpaired using the phone with the watch right next to it.

Since it wasn’t paired to my watch, I wouldn’t think it could use the cellular data from my phone?

mall in all it was a weird issu, but interesting to hear of others having it too.
 
blackjackmark said:
Since it wasn’t paired to my watch, I wouldn’t think it could use the cellular data from my phone?
Click to expand...

It wouldn’t use the data from your phone. When someone goes to pair a watch with activation lock enabled it would use the data from the phone it is pairing with to contact Apple to see if the lock has been released. (Or to verify your appleid and password to release the lock at that time)
 
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Same thing happened to me recently. I unpaired my watch from my phone. I also removed it from the list of devices on AppleID.com. About 4 days later, the buyer received the watch and it was still activation locked.
 
Yep, happened to me recently too. I unpaired the watch, but it was still activation locked. When I go to "FindMy" it's hard to see if the device is there because I own 8 watches (in the process of selling half of them) and they are all just listed as "Apple Watch." To make matters worse, when I click on Account Settings from the iCloud web page, all the watches are still listed there.

Is there a way to verify that a watch is ready to be sold? I don't want to sell a watch and have the buyer not be able to activate it. I'm certainly not going to give them my password either.
 
kryptticAZ said:
Yep, happened to me recently too. I unpaired the watch, but it was still activation locked. When I go to "FindMy" it's hard to see if the device is there because I own 8 watches (in the process of selling half of them) and they are all just listed as "Apple Watch." To make matters worse, when I click on Account Settings from the iCloud web page, all the watches are still listed there.

Is there a way to verify that a watch is ready to be sold? I don't want to sell a watch and have the buyer not be able to activate it. I'm certainly not going to give them my password either.
Click to expand...
Outside of having a friend or family member try and pair the watch with their phone, I don’t know of as way before sending it off to the new buyer.

This recent experience has left me very hesitant to sell any more watches, until I can confirm that Apple has fixed this problem.

Those in this thread need to file a bug report with Apple. What we experienced should definitely not be happening.
 
I remember when I sent my watch in for repair I have to unpair AND delete it from my iCloud account (per Apple support instruction).
 
I recently returned AW3 and during unpairing it asked me to enter my iCloud password to remove find my watch so I assume that took care of it.
 
I just sold an Apple Watch S4, after unpairing it, however the buyer just told me that i appears as locked to my iCloud account. The device does appear neither on my iCloud not on my Apple Watch App. How can I just remotely "wipe and release" the watch. Is there any hard reboot and wipe shortcut for the watch ?
 
Felipe Molina Rodríguez said:
I just sold an Apple Watch S4, after unpairing it, however the buyer just told me that i appears as locked to my iCloud account. The device does appear neither on my iCloud not on my Apple Watch App. How can I just remotely "wipe and release" the watch. Is there any hard reboot and wipe shortcut for the watch ?
Click to expand...
If the watch no longer shows on your iCloud, you will need to either ask for the watch back and refund the buyer’s money, or provide the password to your account so that the buyer can unlock it, and then immediately change the password.
 
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I had a similar problem. I unpaired the watch and took it back to factory settings, and it wasn’t showing up in Find My, so I assumed it was OK. Sent the watch for a trade-in, and then discovered that it was still listed as one of my devices under my account (but not in Find My). I deleted it from my device list, which will hopefully do the trick. When I paired a new watch, the unpairing process hadn’t done a backup, as was supposed to happen. Fortunately there was a fairly recent backup that I was able to use instead. So a few glitches with the unpairing process.
 
Same happened to me with a Ceramic s5 I recently bought...the seller did everything right but it was still locked to his AppleID. Thankfully he was responsive in messages, and was able to turn off Find My for the watch, which did the trick. The unpair/remove process is flawed and overly complicated.
 
SisterBlue22 said:
Same happened to me with a Ceramic s5 I recently bought...the seller did everything right but it was still locked to his AppleID. Thankfully he was responsive in messages, and was able to turn off Find My for the watch, which did the trick. The unpair/remove process is flawed and overly complicated.
Click to expand...

Happened to me recently as well. Sold an SE watch to someone after removing it/unpairing. Buyer sent me a message saying that it had my account still on it. Went to iCloud and didn't have it listed in my devices. Looked in Find My Phone and it was there. Had to remove from there.
 
Seems this is still happening. I did the unpair process which did ask for Apple ID password. New watch, old watch and phone were all on the table at home with excellent Wi-Fi signal so it SHOULD have gotten the message.

I still see the old watch I unpaired in Find My. So if I just “remove this device” in find my I should be good?

maybe find my takes a little while to show the deletion?
 
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I encountered this when I mailed my old watch to relative for them to use. I don't remember the full details but luckily I had used their wifi network with my watch before and I could talk them through the details to fix the problem.
 
MaxBurn said:
Seems this is still happening. I did the unpair process which did ask for Apple ID password. New watch, old watch and phone were all on the table at home with excellent Wi-Fi signal so it SHOULD have gotten the message.

I still see the old watch I unpaired in Find My. So if I just “remove this device” in find my I should be good?

maybe find my takes a little while to show the deletion?
Click to expand...
Just remove it from Find My and Activation Lock will be off immediately afterwards.
Seems to be some bug in the process, I had this happen more than once when I unpaired a Watch for resale
 
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Apple should just introduce a button in General Settings, for all their devices, that does every single thing you need to do to prep it for resale. We’ll call that settings button “Prepare For Resale.” It should erase all content and settings, remove from Find My, remove from AppleID, etc. Think this would minimize a lot of confusion.

Every time I sell an Apple Device, I always find myself sifting through websites and forum posts to make sure I don’t miss anything and that the device has truly been reverted to the way it was when I first unboxed it.
 
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blackjackmark said:
Any ideas why the watch remained attached to my Apple ID, even though it was no longer paired to my iPhone?!?
Click to expand...
Unpairing or performing a factory reset on an Apple device does not necessarily “Detach” it from your Apple ID.
My best practice is to go to icloud.com/find and remove all the devices that are no longer associated with my Apple ID there.
 
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