Today I started noticing that when I receive any sort of notification alert I’d only feel the buzz on my Apple Watch but don’t receive any sound of ping or vibrate on my iPhone. I had just updated my Watch last night and figured it must have changed some sort setting. I did some research and all I can see is this is an intended feature of the Apple Watch/iPhone pairing. Have I just been oblivious to this happening over the past year or is there a setting to where I can get a notification from my iPhone (vibrate/sound) and my Apple Watch at the same time?
You may have just missed that this was happening before. In the Watch app under Notifications you can disable certain alerts from appearing on your watch which will cause them to only show up on your iPhone. You can also un-silence your watch which will let you get an audible ping when notifications come in.
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Must be. If I have my phone on vibrate does it do both? I feel like that’s when I noticed it happening on both and it only since getting a remote job have I really taken my phone off vibrate consistently in years.
Funnily enough, I have the opposite problem. I can’t get notifications to only happen on my watch. Has anyone experienced this and fixed it? It seems to happen intermittently and I suspect cellular is a factor, since it didn’t happen on my S3 non-cellular.
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After rain recent OS update my husband stopped getting notifications on his Watch, it wasn’t making any sounds at all. No amount of app/settings fiddling would fix it. Finally had to restart his Watch. Now everyone is happy again. Ping Buzz Ring
Notifications go either to the watch or the phone, depending on the settings and the state of the device.
@RosemaryOrchard and @tgara are correct; for some reason not apparent to me, notifications go to only one device, either the Watch or the iPhone. I would prefer that the notifications for certain apps such as iMessage go to both, in part for the reason stated below.
There is another problem - the Watch notifications for iMessage are inadequate. The sound notification for iMessage is a faint, high-pitched “ping” that is hard to hear and virtually inaudible in an environment with significant ambient sound. The Watch’s iMessage haptic notification is a subtle throb-like vibration that is softer than the vibrations, taps or clicks produced by other apps (News, for example). Why did Apple chose to make the iMessage notifications harder to hear and feel than notifications from other apps?
Note that many adults have hearing loss at higher frequencies. The particular sound frequency for the Watch iMessage notification is squarely in the range where the hearing loss for many adults occurs. Apple should change this sound notification.
I had extensive conversations with level 2 Apple Care support about this, but no changes are forthcoming, apparently. For those of you who agree, please send a feedback request to Apple https://www.apple.com/feedback/watch.html with one or more of the following suggestions:
- Allow the user the option to receive notifications for selected apps (iMessage) on both the iPhone and iWatch.
- Make the Watch’s default sound notification and haptic notification for iMessage louder and more prominent. And yes, I already know about the general setting for more prominent haptic notifications. That has been done, but the iMessage haptic notification is still less prominent than that for other apps.
- Allow the user to select different types of notifications on the Watch for iMessage - louder, 3-tone sound and more prominent clicking or tapping haptic notification (similar to other apps).