watchOS 4 update released in response to the Apple Watch Series 3’s connectivity issues

“It’s reasonable to expect it might take a minute for the Apple Watch to ‘find’ LTE after you’ve walked away from your phone. It’s not reasonable for this to take many minutes or not work at all. This almost makes me wish there was a way to actively turn off Wi-Fi on the Watch, so it would just default to LTE.”

Instead of immediately connecting to an LTE network when she stepped away from her phone, the watch would join unauthenticated public Wi-Fi networks. (Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal experienced similar issues.) The bug Lauren discovered apparently didn’t have to do with LTE, but instead affected the hand off from Wi-Fi to LTE. At the time our review published, Apple sent Lauren a statement saying a future software release would address the problem. It seems that day has come with today’s release of watchOS 4.0.1, although we have yet to test whether it works.