Pair Apple Watch to new iPhone without updating OS?

[nickdalzell1]

I gave my Series 3 to a friend who had recently broke the screen in her Series 3 (I'm using a Series 5 so the 3 is just taking up space) and I'm having issues with the reset and re-pair procedure (which is needlessly messy compared with a Galaxy Watch)

It took many attempts to reset for one, I'd enter my PIN and hit erase all, and nothing would happen. An hour later, it started resetting. Great. Now when she tries to pair to her new iPhone 11 Pro, it has an activation lock (I never set that up!!!) which forces me to enter my Apple ID into her phone. Then it tries to update to WatchOS 7. (I don't want it to update and neither does she) So I cancelled it. It is now stuck there now.

Now I am not sure what differences exist between the 11 Pro vs. my lolely modified 6S (with updates blocked and it never forced a WatchOS update when I used it a year ago!) but it seems odd it wants to update WatchOS when the same iOS version is running on my 6S and her 11 Pro and obviously the watch paired to my 6S running WatchOS 6 so it should just work or is there more to a reset and re-pair than I thought? Makes me want to consider just buying a new Apple Watch if I ever had to replace my iPhone for any reason!

 

[geekiemac]

From my experience it's almost impossible *not* to update when resetting / repairing an (even older) watch with a new (other) iPhone. Happened to me with a S3 (had to do it twice) and a S5. I ended up updating the S3 to watch OS 7 because I had no other choice, and to my relief it works quite well. A bit laggy compared with the S5 obviously, but it's pretty much ok.

As for the Activation lock, it's something else. It's related to the "Find My (Apple Watch)" feature and is normally turned off when you erase / unpair your watch. More details here. But sometimes the unpairing bugs, which may cause this issue. Normally you should be able to fix that by logging with your Apple ID on iCloud.com and removing the watch from your iCloud account. The detailed procedure is here. This procedure is admittedly not so clear and may occasionally bug. I read that there's a lot of people annoyed by this so let's hope Apple fixes this in future.

 

[nickdalzell1]

She finally got it working without being forced to update. She said she had to cancel and reset a few more times before it decided to work.

I know when I paired to my 6S a little over a year ago the only thing it did was sit there waiting for a check for updates but eventually just started working. I eventually updated to WatchOS 6 (Series 5 came with 6) but that was a few weeks later. I wasn't forced to update at all then. Now, if I were pairing to something with a much newer iOS version then yeah, I can see that happening.

Either way I'm glad she got it working.