How to revive an Apple Watch That Won’t Pair After Resetting the Device

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For the TLDR Crowd. Yesterday after multiple tries to pair my phone with my watch I hard reset the phone and tried again. When it asked me to login to iCloud I did, and then I was able to pair the phone with the watch.

For the patient crowd, for several days I was unable to pair my Apple Watch SE with my iPhone SE 2nd gen. I tried rebooting and resetting the watch and I had no luck. I tried rebooting the phone and still no luck.

I went to iCloud to attempt to remove the watch from their interface and it accepted but couldn’t be marked as completed because there was no watch to say "Yep, let’s stop being friends".

I looked for a way to pair with android but you can’t pair an apple watch with an android phone at all. Meanwhile with a Suunto Wrist HR Baro watch from years ago, no problem.

I considered getting a new phone but I decided "Duck it, let’s try a hard reset of the phone and see if that works. A hard reset is after all, very similar to a factory fresh phone, except for the third party battery and screen with signs of age.

The issue I was having when attempting to pair the watch is that the Apple watch was telling my phone "Sorry, I’m locked" but my phone was telling me "pairing failed, please RTFM" but when I RTFMed there was no information.

For some reason, when I tried to pair with my phone originally it was skipping over the step to authenticate before allowing changes to the watch. It’s because of this failure that my watch was bricked for a few days.

I don’t know whether there is a way to re-initialise pairing via the watch app on an iPhone. I didn’t find it. If I had had this option then I could have resolved the issue within a few minutes as with Garmin, Suunto, Xiaomi, or other devices.

Distractions

I thought that Apple had allowed me to upgrade to an Apple Watch version that was incompatible with my version of iOS. Luckily this wasn’t the case.

And Finally

Resetting a phone to pair a watch is not elegant or fast, but it did work. I would like to see Apple rewrite the pairing process so that it gives me the right error message, so that the OS, and I, could do what is required, without hard resetting the watch, and the phone. Remember, this is an inelegant solution.