Apple Watch, Bluetooth, Phonecalls and Music

iOS
#1

Hi

I have a cellular Apple Watch 3 and i lost my airpods.

I now have some cheap sony bluetooth headsets that pair with the watch for music, but not when a call comes through the watch.

So I end up talking dick tracy style when Im out and about as I no longer carry the phone with me on trips on the bike and to the beach.

Q1 Any ideas how to force the watch to route telephone calls through the headset as well as the music.

Also, recently I was controlling the iphone music app through the watch. Up until that point I could switch between controlling the iphone, or controlling the watch outputting to said crappy sony bluetooth headset.

As I was changing a song on the iphone that was playing on speaker, I took a call on the watch. Since then I have not been able to “see” my iphone music and control it like I used to. Now the only option in the watch music app is the music it is carrying locally and played through bluetooth.

Q2 - any idea how to get the Apple Watch to see the iphone music app again and control it?

Cheers!!
Len

#2

Bump!

#3

Hi Len
For question 1, try pairing the Sony headset with your iPhone and see if you can take calls on it via your iPhone. If you can’t, it might be a limitation of the headset rather than the Apple Watch. Also try un-pairing and re-pairing the headset with your Apple Watch and make sure you’ve removed your AirPods from the Apple Watch and see if that helps.

For question 2 - start playing music on your iPhone via its Music app. On your Apple Watch, go to the Music app via the Dock and it should show the controls. Does that work?

#4

Sorry - one other thing I’d check. On your iPhone, go to the Apple Watch app, then tap General, Wake Screen, and make sure Auto Launch Audio Apps is on. That could also be the culprit.

#5

Re the headset - yesterday I discovered that if I accept the call on the watch while paired the call stays on the watch speaker. But if I take the call by hitting the call accept button on the headset, the call does get routed through the headset. Thats one problem solved.

With the second one, you are right, if there is something playing on the iPhone then the watch will show the iPhone in “now playing” along with anything that was loaded locally and playing on the watch. What I can’t do is browse the iPhone library. I can only access the currently playing track and go backwards and forwards from there. Which is a pain as I would love to be able to.

Since 4.1 I can go into the watch library which confusingly seems to contain all of the locally downloaded content and also listings of whats available through iCloud. Its almost impossible to tell them apart other than what I can tell, the local stuff is in colour with artwork and the online stuff is grey and in text. Thats the only way I have been able to distinguish.

Now I wasn’t sure whether if I picked this online content where it would get it from if the phone was close and had the tracks in question. Since moving my entire library to the phone that should be the preferred option as it would save using unneeded bandwidth. So I put the watch and phone into flight modes and tested the grey “online” content. It wouldn’t play on the watch until I walked close to the watch and it started playing. So given the phone had cellular and wifi off, I presume that content streamed from the phone to the watch. I think! I wish it was clearer how this is all meant to work!!

One thing I would like is to browse the entire library by watch and output to the phone speaker. When i browse the watch library the only output I can select is the bluetooth headphones!

So very not clear!

#6

Watch OS4 removed the ability to browse your phone’s local music library. It’s been replaced in the latest update by Apple Music.

#7

Great find! Thank you for posting this. It explains a lot!

Thats a bit of a step backwards step especially for non-cellular users