The iPhone 13 lineup launched earlier this month. And, unfortunately for some new owners, a bug surfaced that caused the new hardware to not properly communicate with a paired Apple Watch to access the ability to unlock the iPhone 13 with an Apple Watch. This feature is designed to make unlocking an iPhone with Face ID much more streamlined while wearing a mask (but it works without a mask, too, like when wearing certain sunglasses).
But, the bug has impacted many iPhone 13 owners out there in the wild. And, as expected, Apple is working on a fix. Earlier today, the company seeded the second beta of iOS 15.1 to developers. With the prerelease software, Apple has included a fix for the bug causing the “Unable to communicate with Apple Watch” bug.
For those who are running into the issue, they are seeing a pop-up that reads, “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch. Make sure your Apple Watch is unlocked and on your wrist, and your iPhone is unlocked.” It can be even more annoying when a user hasn’t even set up the feature just yet, and the software prompts them to set it up. So even though the software wants the user to activate the feature, they are unable to.
With this second beta, the bug has been fixed. Which means that an authenticated Apple Watch can now be used to unlock a paired iPhone 13 without issue.
Resource: How to unlock iPhone with Apple Watch
Unfortunately for folks who aren’t beta testers, this means they’ll have to wait for the public launch of iOS 15.1 to actually fix the issue. Hopefully, that wait is not too long from now.
Have you run into this issue?