For anyone who stumbles on this. The best way of getting the watch to connect is as follows: On the watch, go to Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Developer Mode and toggle off then on and then Restart the watch (just restarting the watch does not always work). Then I turn on developer mode and trust my laptop and it connects though about 50% of the time it disconnects shortly after this. Also, my watch is at 70% battery.

Developing on the watch is stupid fragile. Seriously. XCode needs to set up a secure tunnel to the watch using wifi but the watch regularly turns off or looses its wifi. There is so much magic here that like I said, embarassing to the watch team at apple. Here are options that work for me: The watch will often disconnect from the router even though it is on. My first solution is to go into Settings -> WiFi and make sure it is connected to the router. This works about 70% of the time. If it doesnt, you can try toggling developer mode on the watch to get to the Trust Computer which sometimes works. Turn on your hotspot on your phone, then connect your mac and your watch to it and hope this works. You have about a 50% chance here. If your home network is a mesh network, then make sure that the APs have handed off so that all the devices are on the same AP. I can not prove this other than through observation. So yes, turn on and off the wifi on all the devices. Supposedly, you can actually turn on your wifi but do not connect to any router on all your devices. The networking protocol supposedly will make the connection between the Apple devices. I tried this once and I think it worked (I lose track of every voodoo dance I do).

I have been focused on the iOS companion right now, but will be making another update to the watch app. I will capture the sysdiagnostics data and update my feedback

@darkpaw Unfortunately this did not work. Its been over a day. I can not believe how fragile developing on Apple is. Really embarrassing for a company that tries to own the entire ecosystem. Also another word on how sloppy Apple is even hear on the forum, tried to reply directly to you and got "undefinedundefined Your post couldn’t be saved. Please try again in a few minutes."

I have now spent about 12 hours on this. I have pretty much tried everything now, including trying to completely uninstall Xcode and reinstall it as well as unpairing the watch from the phone. Where I am now is that I can get the phone to be seen by xcode but when it pairs and connects, when I click on the phone, it DOES NOT show that the watch is paired with the phone. Name Hostname Identifier State Model -------------- ------------------------------ ------------------------------------ ----------- -------------------------- Bryan's iPhone Bryans-iPhone.coredevice.local 9E04C304-C46E-5719-B97A-5FE176AA60B7 connected iPhone 17 Pro (iPhone18,1) Bryan’s iPad Bryans-iPad.coredevice.local 2B7A9ED0-E1E5-5C0B-9BD7-9BADC752CED4 unavailable iPad (A16) (iPad15,7) What is also the problem is that because I re-paired my watch, there is no developer mode available. So caught in some sort of nefarious loop. I will try waiting to the morning, but honestly, if this works then it is like a big WTF Apple. I really appreciate the response. Fingers crossed.

This is such a ridiculous saga. I have spent the entire day trying to get this to work. First, I tried unpairing the watch and that was a big mistake. It took me an hour to finally get it paired, but now 100% of the time the device will not connect. I am moments away from returning this watch and iPhone and just giving up. Whatever engineers at Apple are responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. I have worked on embedded systems a lot and this is just as bad, if not worse.