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Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and Mac not working?

A

ALOHAPPLE

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 3, 2014
36
4
Anyone else? Loving everything on my new M1 MBA, so far... truly blown away. But when I attempt to turn on the Security & Privacy setting use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac, I get the attached error message. I have power cycled my Watch and iPhone. Any suggestions?

Screen Shot 2020-11-18 at 10.55.04 AM.png
 
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Yes I was on 11.0.1 and it would allow me to enable it but to didn't work. I updated to the beta 11.1 hoping that would fix it but now I get that same error message now. So far seeing lots of little issues with M1.
 
So I have two watches, an S2 and S4. I put on the S2 and then selected it in preferences and it worked. Went back to the S4 and no go. Unpaired it, then restored from backup. After a couple tries selecting the S4, I finally got it to work.

If you only have one watch, try unpair/pair.
 
I know I had it working yesterday and even unlocking 1password which was awesome. It's not working today and I don't know how the timing correlates to upgrading to 11.0.1 but I know I did that later in the day yesterday as I thought they shipped with 11.0.1.
I haven't gotten it working again yet though and with all the reports of issues I'm not about to restore back to 11.0.0 and try again. Tried following the steps here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251826134 but I don't think you can delete stuff out of ~/Library/Sharing anymore, or at least I couldn't even with sudo.
 
Tuscape said:
I know I had it working yesterday and even unlocking 1password which was awesome. It's not working today and I don't know how the timing correlates to upgrading to 11.0.1 but I know I did that later in the day yesterday as I thought they shipped with 11.0.1.
I haven't gotten it working again yet though and with all the reports of issues I'm not about to restore back to 11.0.0 and try again. Tried following the steps here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251826134 but I don't think you can delete stuff out of ~/Library/Sharing anymore, or at least I couldn't even with sudo.
Click to expand...
I could delete them with Finder and followed all of the steps in the URL. Still no workee with the same message as above.
 
It took some trying on my wife's Air. I ended up deleting tokens in the Apple Keychain access.
Having your iPhone nearby unlocked also has been reputed to help.

-- After too many efforts to count I finally got both of my watches recognized on my MacBook Pro M1.
 
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Had this issue. On the phone to Apple support over an hour, tried lots of things none worked. I suggested trying logging out of Apple ID. That worked
 
ADonmall said:
Had this issue. On the phone to Apple support over an hour, tried lots of things none worked. I suggested trying logging out of Apple ID. That worked
Click to expand...

Can you let us know if it still works fine after a few days? It stops working after a few days even when it worked fine on day one.
 
Spent a decent amount of time with support last night and just spoke with the next tier for a bit and it looks like I'm good for right now. After trying all sorts of stuff finally I removed everything that could be causing interference, unpaired the watch, logged out of Apple ID on Mac, logged out of Apple ID on phone, rebooted Mac and phone, logged into Apple ID on Mac, logged into Apple ID on phone, paired the watch and I could enable unlock and it's working! Now to see if it stays working...
 
Mine isn’t working with my s6. Tried deleting keychain and logging out and back in with no luck. I’d rather wait for a patch than unpair and pair my watch. Have had too many bad restore from backup experiences with the watch.
 
After much back and forth - deleting plists, tokens in key chain, rebooting etc. I got both Watches to connect and they now work reliably. Very nice.
 
I’ve a M1 mac mini, fresh install 11.0.1 with Apple Watch Series 4 with watchOS 7.1

Unlock with watch is working for me.
 
Problem resolved in an embarrassing way: I had not updated to watchOS 7.1... I was still on 7.0.x... somehow I missed it when 7.1 dropped and I never received a notification. The 7.1 release notes specifically address this issue.
 
My wife is having this problem in Bug Sur on a 2019 Intel MBP, so I don't think it's M1-specific.
 
My Apple Watch series 6 works with M1 Air but sometimes it is slower than other times. Also it sometimes requires me to use finger print to login. I would say my watch unlocks it about 85% of the time.
 
I have a fix that worked for me without doing anything else; I turned on fast user switching via System Prefs > Users & Groups > Login Options > Show fast user switching.

With that both Touch ID and Apple Watch is much more reliable.
 
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