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Apple Watch Series 3 keeps rebooting on watchOS 7, here’s what to do

If you own an Apple Watch Series 3 and have not installed watchOS7 yet, you might want to think twice before upgrading. Many users are reporting the software is buggy. The biggest complaint is that the Series 3 watch for some keeps randomly rebooting after the upgrade.

A few threads have opened up on Reddit discussing the issue. Those affected report that random reboots happen multiple times per day. Most often, this occurs when they leave a known WiFi network.

“It seems to trigger when I leave a WiFi network (like when I go to grab the mail across the street for example). But it doesn’t always happen. Really frustrating.” one user reports.

“Me same…. exiting from home with my car and s3 always reboots when wifi signal is lost.” another one says.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in some instances the watch completely freezes. This requires you to hold both buttons for 10 seconds to force-reboot it. Others mention that watch is failing to load complications on multiple faces, disconnects from the smartphone and more.

Then there are those that say the new software causes a larger battery drain. So much so that they are running out of power in the evening, instead of using up only 30-50% for the day.

What you can do to resolve

There is no fix yet that has worked universally. But to try and resolve you can try unpairing the watch, re-pairing with the app and setting it up as new. Or doing a reset but not restoring from a backup. This is what Apple Support staff are suggesting.

You won’t lose your historical fitness data as this is retained in the smartphone app. The only thing you will lose is watch face customization. Users have reported that this has worked in some cases, but not in others. So it’s worth a try.

If it doesn’t resolve there isn’t much else you can do. This is a bug so if you’ve already installed watchOS 7 you might need to live with the issue until Apple issues a fix. The recent 7.0.1 update has not done much to resolve.

It’s a bit strange the company has let this go on for so long. Beta software users were reporting the same problem 2-3 months ago. Unfortunately, there is no means of uninstalling and reverting watchOS to a previous version.

Needless to say, having a watch reboot itself multiple times per day can be super-annoying. If you’ve not upgraded yet, it might be an idea to wait a bit until Apple finally squashes the bug.

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Marko Maslakovic

Marko founded Gadgets & Wearables in 2014, having worked for more than 15 years in the City of London’s financial district. Since then, he has led the company’s charge to become a leading information source on health and fitness gadgets and wearables.

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