Verizon is About to Break our Watches

jjefftk about 4 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on jefftk.com

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Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

anonymousiam•about 2 hours ago

So the author probably could have migrated if he hadn't used a Google Fi phone number for 2FA. Some banks and businesses (such as Uber) will detect a Google Fi or Google Voice number and not let you use them. Other businesses don't do the detection, but the 2FA texts will never arrive. Like the author, I've got some accounts that I was able to set up for 2FA using a Google account, but 2FA no longer works on them.

zdw•24 minutes ago

Blocking specific service providers in this way should be made illegal.

It's an abuse of market power primarily used to eliminate competition.

colechristensen•about 1 hour ago

Google Voice? (and other strictly VoIP services) Absolutely.

I've never had a single problem with Google Fi.

bombcar•about 3 hours ago

Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.

derefr•about 3 hours ago

In what way are watches with SIMs (or eSIMs) not just tiny cell phones? Or is you meaning that the modern smartphone is itself a “pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks”?

sulam•about 2 hours ago

The main way is that literally zero of these watches actually meet the standards that the cell networks require of a cell phone. Every single one of them has a carrier exemption or a lower standard to adhere to, because it turns out that putting a cell phone's RF package into a watch is super hard, both because of size and the various negative effects of the human body on radio signals. This affects cell phones too of course, but less so (remember the iPhone 4 and how we were "holding it wrong"?).

Another way is that watch chipsets are distinct from cell phone chipsets in that they make a variety of compromises unique to wearable requirements. Apple may be an exception here, you can't get a spec sheet for their chip, but for the other providers their wearable chipsets are generations behind anything they sell for a cell phone and are compromised in terms of power. Interestingly even watches (Apple, Samsung soon) that support 5G are running a dumbed down version of 5G that was created specifically to support the wearables and IoT market.

It gets even stranger in software. A text showing up on your watch might have arrived two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text and you can't tell which. The watch often doesn't even have its own number -- it's borrowing your phone's. IOW, it's not a tiny phone doing phone things, it's a companion device trying to fake it.

TazeTSchnitzel•about 2 hours ago

A few years ago, I signed up for an Apple Watch eSIM plan (which is a special type of eSIM plan that Apple make cell carriers agree to offer as an add-on to a normal cell subscription for your iPhone, and there is no other way go get an eSIM for it).

I then started regularly receiving phone calls (to my iPhone) intended for someone else. At first I thought it was a wrong number or an old number and kept telling them to remove this number. Buy the calls kept coming and I eventually I dared to ask what number they had dialed. And it wasn't a cell number I recognised.

After contacting support for my carrier, what I figured out was that the Apple Watch eSIM has its own phone number, for some reason, but it's not one you're supposed to know about; as an extension of your phone's subscription, the Apple Watch eSIM notionally has the same number as it. But they were calling the secret number associated with the eSIM, somehow. And I think there was a problem in the number routing table somewhere, because I think this number may have been in use with another cell carrier, and the calls only went to me when calling from my network?

Absurd nightmare situation.

manquer•about 1 hour ago

> two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text

Isn't that true for any device? not just watches?

A "regular text" would be an SMS and those use Signaling System Number 7 telephony stack.

iMessage uses application level protocols sitting on top of IP in the standard OSI model?.

SS No 7 only roughly maps into OSI model, the equivalent application layer would use MAP - Mobile application part.

izacus•about 2 hours ago

What do you mean by "carrier exception"? Exception from policies those same carriers set up decades ago?

acdha•about 3 hours ago

I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud team who verified my identity and back to a third person who solved the problem by deleting and recreating the line on our account. Every one of the people I talked to was clearly trying to help but their billing system sounds like it’s someone’s old house primarily consisting of duct tape and stucco.

This is a disappointing contrast to their actual network which is clearly run by people who take running a reliable network seriously with good coverage and latency.

jjtheblunt•about 1 hour ago

which network?

teliskr•about 2 hours ago

I have a verizon watch only account. I was able to get the new app working, but it was a struggle. I think it worked on the 3rd or 4th attempt. I had to start over and lost all of the contacts that were connected to the watch. Fortunately, there were only a few.

Overall, the Gizmo watch has been nice to have, but it leaves a lot to be desired. It's surprising that there are not better products in this market segment.

Grombobulous•30 minutes ago

The Apple Watch isn’t a better product?

https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-for-your-kids/

mgiampapa•about 2 hours ago

I feel like this is an edge case where it's less expensive for Verizon to issue a refund than it is to actually fix the problem. Sometimes paying for the problem to go away is the best solution and you get a new thing that works better.

Grombobulous•31 minutes ago

I hate to blame the victim here, but anyone in the 2020s buying a carrier-branded piece of cellular hardware should have expected this sort of thing.

We already learned this lesson back in the days before the iPhone when phones had carrier logos printed on them and GPS apps cost $5/month.

Apple Watch Kids Mode is what you want. If the watches cost too much grab a used one.

The author complained about the high price in the original review but they didn’t really spend enough. They bought a crappy telecom knockoff of an Apple Watch. You get what you pay for.

bee_rider•about 3 hours ago

I wonder what the warranty period on this sort of device is. It’s broken without access to the hub, right? And it’s only 2 years old.

motbus3•about 2 hours ago

Since beginning of 2025 big corps turned to be each time more anti consumer. They feel quite comfortable. I wonder what happened for them to feel like that.

bigC5560•about 2 hours ago

Sounds to me like you just became aware of it in 2025. This has been happening for forever. Keeping with the electronics example, the Phoebus cartel was lowering the lifespan of lightbulbs in the 1920s. The US government seemed to be stricter on it at that time (I mean in the 1920s), but billions of dollars in lobbying will change that over time.

mr_toad•about 2 hours ago

Pretty sure that phone companies have been anti-customer ever since the invention of the telephone.

tyre•about 1 hour ago

Reminds me of a recent tweet:

> this has been talked about extensively you're just 21

This isn't new behavior. Not by years, but decades.

diego_moita•about 2 hours ago

> Since beginning of 2025

I suggest you to study the birth of consumer protection laws on the beginning of the 20th century, such as the birth of the FTC in 1914. It was a time when milk and beer were routinely adulterated, most meat was contaminated and all sorts of cartels did price fixing [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_Act_o...

replygirl•about 2 hours ago

just since 2025?

nxm•about 2 hours ago

Any actual evidence to backup this claim?

kmbfjr•about 2 hours ago

Are you serious?

Only in the last week we have Sony deleting paid-for movies. That is pretty anti-consumer.

I realize all of this is empirical, but the term enshitification just didn’t form out of thin air.

cj•about 2 hours ago

He's probably looking for evidence of "Since beginning of 2025". (I'm curious too)

Feels like we've been on the same train for over a decade.

Hizonner•about 2 hours ago

Hey, that scorpion stung me!

Underphil•about 2 hours ago

Honestly, I'm beginning to feel the same at this point. How many stories of people getting burned do we need before we collectively wake up?

tolerance•about 1 hour ago

This is the sort of web page that the street's been missing. The comments aggregator is interesting. Not to mention the hover-overs for the related posts.

fragmede•about 3 hours ago

Choosing a carrier device without being on that carrier for the rest of your devices would seem to be the first mistake. Treating the carrier as anything other than dumb pipe seems like the issue here. Going with the Pixel Watch LTE and then doing same custom app development might make more sense for the described use case, but I haven't explored the author's use case thoroughly.

ghostly_s•about 3 hours ago

Good point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.

NetMageSCW•about 3 hours ago

How would the custom app disable the native Watch services?

anonymars•about 2 hours ago

So you blame the victim and also admit you haven't explored the author's use case. Very helpful

fragmede•11 minutes ago

The victim is complaining that they were hurt. I seek to empower them to not be hurt further. What are you bringing to the table? Snide comments?

lowbloodsugar•about 3 hours ago

Is part of US phone cartel. What you expect?

s3p•about 1 hour ago

Shaming someone for buying cell service in the United States is just strange

What do you expect them to do, move out of the country for a $10 / mo cell plan?