After my child’s Apple Watch Series 6 battery went bad I decided to replace it with a refurbished Series 6 GPS + Cellular from Walmart. I thought this should be easy…just call Verizon let them know I’m upgrading / replacing the watch, pair to my iPhone 16 Pro, and I should be good to go. What I found out was the process is incredibly frustrating and difficult and I want to share my lessons learned to help you should you embark on the same journey.
Verizon Family Sharing Authentication Issue
The old Apple Watch Series 6 was set up with Verizon on a family sharing plan for $20/month. My iPhone voice and data plan is through Xfinity Mobile, which does not support Family Sharing. After doing some research I found that this is a known and acknowledged issue, but Xfinity has no plans to fix it.
After pairing the new watch to my iPhone, I called Verizon customer support to activate the new watch. After 2-3 hours on the phone and talking to multiple tech support reps I was not able to activate the new watch. I thought all you needed to do was provide them with the IMEI number of the watch and that was all that was needed to activate, but I found out that Verizon implemented a new security feature requiring you to receive a text message to an existing device before they will complete the activation. The conundrum for me was that my old Apple Watch was a single device on the Family Sharing plan that had to be unpaired from my iPhone before I could set up the new Series 8 watch. Therefore there were no devices active on the Verizon network to receive the security text message! They said they could not send it to a non-Verizon connected device. Customer support said they kept trying to do an override, but to no avail the system would not allow them to activate the watch. The only workaround was for me to go to a “Corporate Verizon Store,” where they had access to a different system to complete the override.
Fast forward to going to the Verizon store. After almost an hour at the store, they too were not able to activate the phone. I believe the issue was that even though I was setting the phone up for a child under Family Sharing, the Verizon rep kept telling me to set it up for myself. By setting it up that way it was forcing the watch to activate cellular through Xfinity Mobile, which as we discussed earlier does not support Family Sharing service. I left the store without a working watch and even more frustrated than before.
BetterRoaming Family Sharing to The Rescue
After doing some research online I found a provider called BetterRoaming that supports stand alone Family Sharing for Apple Watches. Apparently this is one of the few known workarounds for the Xfinity iPhone Family Sharing cellular activation issue. I followed the following steps to activate the Apple Watch under Family Sharing mode, which finally worked:
- Pair Apple Watch to your iPhone using the Watch App under “Family Sharing” mode. Do not pair the Apple watch under “Set Up for Myself” mode.
- Make sure that you set it up with an Apple / iCloud account for your child.
- Go to BetterRoaming and select Apple Watch and choose a plan. They offer a free 7-day trial. After you enter your IMEI they will validate that your watch can be supported on their network and then complete setting up your account and billing. They will then issue a new esim and phone number, which should take less than 5 minutes.
- You should receive a notification when cellular service is ready for your watch, but if you don’t go to the Watch App set up for the new watch and select Cellular.
- Follow the steps to set up Cellular under BetterRoaming, which I think appears as “Global 1” on your phone.
- Once you complete set up, your new Apple Watch should be working in Family Sharing mode.
Summary
I hope these lessons learned help you with setting up your child’s Apple Watch under Family Sharing mode. I really wish the process was much easier and my carrier supported Family Sharing, which would have made this so much simpler. Good luck.