Apple Watch Series 3 Owners Report Serious Issues with watchOS 7

Apple Watch Series 3 owners who haven’t upgraded to watchOS 7 may want to put on the brakes. According to a growing number of reports on Apple support forums, watchOS 7 is causing multiple issues with the older Apple Watch Series 3. It’s so bad users desperately want to roll back to watchOS 6, but are unable to do so.

The issues with watchOS 7 and the Apple Watch Series 3 range from mildly annoying to more serious changes that affect the watch’s performance.

The most concerning effect is on the battery, which is draining significantly faster with watchOS 7 than watchOS 6. People also are reporting that they can no longer unlock their MacBooks with their watch.

Other less significant but still annoying issues on watchOS 7 include slow loading apps and complications that fail to open.

Users also report problems with the watch randomly shutting down and locking up unexpectedly.

More than one watch owner has remarked that this is the “buggiest upgrade” they have seen. Unfortunately, once watchOS 7 is installed, it can not be uninstalled.

How Can I Fix These Issues?

Some users have found that disabling the heart rate option seems to eliminate the crashes and reboots.

You can find Heart Rate in the Watch app on your iPhone under the Privacy section.

The best option right now is to not upgrade at all. Unfortunately, you need to turn off auto-update to avoid having the update install on its own.

Apple recently rolled out watchOS 7 to existing Apple Watch Series 5, Series 4, and Series 3 owners. The update added a handful of new features, including new watch face sharing, watch face customizations, sleep tracking and more.

These types of issues during upgrades are common. There typically are growing pains as new operating systems push the limits of these older devices. Usually, Apple tries to iron out these issues before releasing any updates, but this time it appears that things are not going as smoothly as expected.