Apple Watch Will Soon Lose iPhone Wi-Fi Sync in the EU
Jesse Hollington / iDrop News
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Earlier this year, we began seeing hints that Apple might start pulling features from many European users in response to the requirements of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). With iOS 26.2, we may now be seeing the first casualty of those new rules.
Until now, Apple has mostly held back on rolling out new features in the EU, but this time it may be taking one away. In a statement to French site Numerama?, Apple said it had made the decision to disable Wi-Fi synchronization between the iPhone and Apple Watch to avoid being forced to comply with a new EU requirement that would require it to open Wi-Fi to third-party accessories by the end of 2025.
It’s not entirely clear what the impact of this will be, but it sounds like the report is referring specifically to the synchronization of Wi-Fi network information with an Apple Watch — not the ability of an Apple Watch to communicate with an iPhone over Wi-Fi. Unlike AirDrop or other peer-to-peer protocols, the Apple Watch doesn’t use point-to-point Wi-Fi to communicate with a paired iPhone; it relies on Bluetooth when nearby and connects to a known Wi-Fi network when out of range.
Under normal circumstances, the iPhone shares its list of Wi-Fi networks with the Apple Watch, letting it seamlessly connect to any network the iPhone has been connected to. If Numerama’s report is accurate, Apple Watch models in the EU will no longer automatically inherit Wi-Fi network credentials from the paired iPhones. Users should still be able to use Wi-Fi from their Apple Watch, but they’ll need to connect to new networks manually from the watchOS Settings app.
Apple versus the DMA
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been a thorn in Apple’s side from the start, but it’s also been a double-edged sword for users. Many have celebrated its opening of the app ecosystem, but there’s another, darker chapter in the legislation: forced interoperability requirements.
While the European Commission arguably has a point about app marketplace competition, the DMA goes beyond just ordering Apple to allow rival app stores. In March, the EU announced that the DMA’s interoperability requirements will also require Apple to open up its hardware connectivity features.
This requires Apple to provide non-Apple smartwatches with the same iPhone integration as the Apple Watch, headphone manufacturers to build AirPods-compatible earbuds, and provide its AirDrop and AirPlay specs so that any hardware or software manufacturer can build devices to share files and audio/video streams with an Apple device.
This would also naturally apply to any future connectivity features. In fact, Apple would be required to make detailed technical documentation available to all hardware and software manufacturers — including its competitors — before it’s even permitted to roll out a new feature in the EU. This is ostensibly to ensure that it doesn’t have an unfair advantage in favoring its own ecosystem.
While the EC only announced the specifics earlier this year, the writing has been on the wall since the DMA first passed into law two years ago. The most demanding interoperability requirements don’t take full effect until the end of 2025, which likely explains why Apple is beginning to make changes now — well ahead of that deadline. These provisions have already delayed the rollout of Apple Intelligence by nearly eight months, and Apple is still holding off on iPhone Mirroring and SharePlay screen sharing?, presumably because the DMA would require those features to be opened up to Windows, Linux, and Android platforms if made available to EU iPhone users.
That’s not to say that Apple won’t bring these features to the EU eventually, but there are security and privacy issues to be addressed. It’s easy to build a secure protocol when you control all the pieces; it’s much more complicated when you have to think about how other developers could misuse or even abuse them.
Still, in some cases, there’s simply no way for Apple to open features up without compromising user privacy and security. This isn’t about the Apple Watch, per se, but rather the fact that other companies have to be allowed to access the same capabilities. If the Apple Watch can access a list of Wi-Fi networks from an iPhone, so can a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses — potentially giving away the history of which Wi-Fi networks you’ve joined and when.
Meta doesn’t exactly have the best track record on privacy, but that company is merely the devil we know. The EU would require Apple to open up this information to any third-party hardware or software developer requesting access. Earlier this year, as part of its compliance disclosures under the DMA, Apple published a white paper warning that the DMA’s interoperability mandate could be abused to demand access to personal information that “Apple itself has chosen not to access in order to provide the strongest possible protection to users.”
Since the DMA is primarily concerned with Apple giving itself an unfair advantage over competitors, it doesn’t apply to features that aren’t available in the EU. In this case, Apple is using that loophole to draw a line in the sand: if the Apple Watch can’t access an iPhone’s Wi-Fi network history, there’s no need for Apple to share that data with anyone else.
