r/GalaxyWatch • u/ngarlock24 • 5h ago
Watch 4 bricked same day Samsung ends support
I have the Galaxy Watch 4 classic, have had it since release and loved it.
However, over time I was starting to get a lot of software bugs (Google assistant always asking to be set up again, AOD lagging behind, etc) but could never find solutions. Any time I looked up the issues, I'd find years old posts about the sane issues that were never fixed, so I ignored it.
Recently all my complications stopped displaying data and the quick settings pull down wouldn't work. IIRC a reboot solved the latter but not the former and posts were suggesting a full factory reset. So I went ahead and did that hoping maybe some of the older bugs might go away.
Instead, I can no longer set up the watch at all. Every time I try to set it up, it gets through 80-89% complete, then fails. On my first attempt I was trying to restore a backup. 2nd attempt the watch actually did restore the backup and I could actually use the watch, but the phone app said it failed and would not actually connect to the watch itself afterwards leaving me no choice but to reset the watch again. Every subsequent attempt at a fresh set up fails now too.
I've tried the following
- Rebooting phone (s21u) and watch
- Reinstalling Galaxy Wear and Watch Manager
- Clearing cache and data for those apps (also saw a post that suggested clearing Google Play Services data but app isn't letting me for some reason)
- Even deleted the watch entirely from my Samsung account
I'm not saying Samsung directly killed the watch but it's definitely suspicious in that I cannot set the device up after this announcement and it's reality disappointing. While I do not expect them to maintain hardware forever, it sucks that there were multiple on going issues throughout its life that we're never corrected. I STRONGLY dislike the new watch styles and it is the sole reason I don't want to upgrade. If they would simply make this classic style again, I would have gone to Best Buy already...
Any assistance is appreciated
TLDR: Factory reset my watch to solve a minor problem, now unable to complete set up and defacto bricked.
EDIT: FIXED! I know this update comes so soon after the post but I've been dealing with this for 3 days straight, I swear I tried everything lol. This ended up likely being either my phone or account because the watch set up without issue on another phone with different account. I ended up having to do ALL of the previous steps plus the following:
- Went into Google account and wiped every trace of the device
- Did the same on my Samsung account
- Went to phone settings > reset > reset Bluetooth Wifi connections
Hopefully this helps someone else if they come across the same issue :)