Comments on: Can’t Unlock Apps on Mac With Your Apple Watch? How-To Fix

By: cica

cica — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 12:42:14 +0000

In reply to Jeff. unpair and pair again. worked for me.

By: ricarol

ricarol — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:06:20 +0000

Thank you so much for taking the time to download this info….. It worked. My Mac stopped recognising my watch when I updated to Big Sur. Frustration in trying to reconfigure. By downloading firevalt as per your instruction, it allow the Mac to recognise my watch. Really a happy Chappy. Thank you

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:22:13 +0000

This isn’t my solution but was posted in another thread by stoska992, but it worked for me and many others!

I’ve finally fixed it! I found a bunch of errors related to “AutoUnlock” in the Console that was hinting to me that there was some invalid state on my Mac with keys and plists not being reset properly.

Steps (follow at your own discretion)

Open “Keychain Access”
In “View”, enable “Show Invisible Items”
Search for “Auto Unlock”
You should see a whole bunch of application passwords for “Auto Unlock: XXXX’s …”
Select all records and delete (this will reset/disable auto unlock on other Macs if you use multiple Macs)
Whilst still in “Keychain Access”, search for “AutoUnlock” (no space)
There should be 4 entries for “tlk” “tlk-nonsync” “classA” “classC”
Select 4 records and delete (don’t worry if they re-appear, the system repairs this automatically)
Open “Finder” and navigate to “~/Library/Sharing/AutoUnlock”
There should be two files “ltk.plist” and “pairing-records.plist”
Delete both files
Open “System Preferences” and try enabling auto unlock. You may need to enable it twice, the first attempt will fail.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 12:09:49 +0000

Did not work for me at all. It is a long article that covers all the usual stuff that most if not all Mac users do but did not offer anything that fixed my problem. I am running Mac OS 10.15.7 and Apple Watch 5 with the latest Watch OS.
It was working before I updated to both Mac OS and Watch OS.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 15:33:15 +0000

Thanks! I looked at quite a few trouble-shooting articles and went through even more forum discussions without any luck. You solved the issue for me with your restarting both the iMac and Apple Watch suggestion. Much appreciated.