Apple today seeded the second beta of iOS 15.1 to developers, and the update includes a fix for an annoying bug that's been affecting iPhone 13 owners who also have an Apple Watch.
With beta 2, the Unlock with Apple Watch feature that was broken has been fixed, and an authenticated Apple Watch can once again be used to unlock an iPhone 13 model when wearing a mask.
Prior to the update, attempting to enable the Unlock with Apple Watch feature under Settings > Face ID & Passcode would result in an error that said the iPhone was unable to communicate with the Apple Watch. That error message has now been addressed, and the feature can be successfully toggled on after updating to iOS 15.1 beta 2.
Apple in a support document promised that a fix for the issue would be coming in a future update, and it appears that update may be iOS 15.1. It's not clear if we'll also see an iOS 15.0.1 update that has a fix, as it could still be several weeks before iOS 15.1 sees a public release.
Top Rated Comments
Love the timing of this, with my first vacation since before the pandemic starting on Saturday, I'm going to be in and out of a couple airports towing luggage and children and was going to be using this a ton. Probably not gonna travel on beta software.
How do you unlock your phone to access your password locker so you can access your phone password to then unlock your phone which you'd already unlocked so you could access the password locker? :D
Joking aside - the mask/watch/phone unlock is important functionality for so many people that it's rather surprising that bug got past Apple and into the release version. Apple hopefully realizes they need to push the fix out ASAP for this reason and not lollygag around until a x.1 release.