Watch App crashing while activating grandmother's Apple Watch Series 3

I had a similar issue trying to pair my Apple Watch 1st gen (Series 0) with my iPhone SE 1st gen. Every time the process reached “Activating Apple Watch,” the Watch app would either crash or suddenly show “Unpairing Apple Watch.” I tried resetting both devices multiple times in different ways, but nothing worked — until I stumbled upon this workaround:

Start clean with your Apple Watch fully erased, and make sure it’s no longer linked to any Apple ID.

1. Start the pairing process normally, with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth enabled (but no mobile data).
2. A few seconds later, when the screen says “Connecting to Apple Watch” — and before it reaches “Activating Apple Watch” (the point where it always failed for me) — turn off Wi-Fi. Make sure mobile data is also off.
3. Somehow, this causes the activation step to be skipped entirely, and it jumps straight to the Terms & Conditions screen.
4. After accepting, continue the setup and choose “Set up later” or “Don’t activate” for anything optional. You can enable those features afterward — this just keeps the initial process clean.
5. If syncing begins, at some point the app will ask you to reconnect to the internet. At that moment, turn Wi-Fi or mobile data back on and let the process continue.

(In my case, I noticed it sometimes stalled during syncing, so I toggled Wi-Fi off and on again just in case — though I’m not sure that step was necessary.)

After that, the sync completed and my Apple Watch was successfully paired. I was later able to activate everything else and link it to iCloud without any issues.

It seems like disabling Wi-Fi at the right moment bypasses whatever server check was causing the crash. I can’t guarantee it’ll work for everyone, but it might be worth trying if you’re stuck at the same point.

Let me know if it helps!

P.S. Unfortunately, Apple’s support team was very kind but ultimately unable to help me. They didn’t explore alternative solutions like the one I ended up discovering myself. Instead, they referred me to an “authorized service provider” who wanted to charge a hefty fee just to diagnose the issue and “see what they could do.” Honestly, quite disappointing from Apple — I had to figure it out on my own.

This was odd. On my iPhone 7 on iOS 15 Watch app would crash exactly as described. The trick of switching data connections off at the right moment finally let me activate Watch 3rd gen on watchOS 8. I was wondering if iPhone 7 was encountering problems with not enough memory. Tried rebooting iPhone and re-installed Watch app. I would say it is an issue at the Apple servers side instead.

Turned off wifi on the iphone??

Thank you so much for this!!! I had two very disappointing a with Apple Support today about this! (iPhone SE 2016 / Series 2 watch)

Thank you very, very much!

This solution works without any issue, i’ve tried for the first time and now i’m happy user of oldschool Apple Watch!

Thank you brother it’s work for me. You’re solved my problem. I have spent alot of time to fix my watch 7. finally my watch 7 can paired with my i phone 7 plus again. Thank You.

Thanks for the working Nefix! That worked for me :)

On what basis do you think there is a server wide problem? Surely that would affect everyone.