Apple Watch pairing error

[JonathanB]

Hi everyone,

We've moved everything relating to Apple Watch pairing issues to this new conversation and will be providing all future updates as edits to this post, so that you won't need to go searching through the comments for these.

I appreciate these pairing errors must be very frustrating, especially for those of you that have been running into issues for several weeks now. Technical specialists are continuing to look into this, however based on what they've seen so far, this does not seem to be one overall fault that we can apply a blanket fix to.

With this in mind, please make sure you have followed the advice on the private message we've sent to each of you, this will ensure that your individual case has been escalated. We've originally sent these messages out a couple of weeks ago, so I'll double check that everyone that has commented has received these. You can find your community messages by clicking on your avatar in the top right of any page, then on "Messages".

Finally, please ensure you are following the Community House Rules when posting on the community, particularly points 8 and 13.

The private message mentioned above will put you in touch with a team that you can raise a complaint with should you wish to do so, any comments that share details of individual Three employees will be removed from the community.

JonathanB

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**Update 26/10/2022**

Hi everyone,

We really appreciate your patience whilst we've been working on this issue. I can't imagine how frustrating it is to not be able to take full advantage of your Apple watches.

As I mentioned last week above, the errors do not seem to be one overall fault that can be fixed immediately for everyone. We do need a specialist team to do some work in the background on your accounts. With this in mind, I'd advise the following:

• Make sure you've taken any action we've recommended on private messages to your community account. If you're experiencing these issues and we don't already know, please reply on this post so we can reach out.
• Do not repeatedly attempt unpairing and pairing, this may be interfering with the work done in the background. Please wait for a Three representative to contact you and advise before you unpair and pair again.

We've seen some great progress towards getting this sorted in the last few days, I'm hopeful that it won't be too much longer till this issue is fully resolved for everyone.

JonathanB

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**Update 17/11/2022**

 Hi everyone,

We’re really sorry that there’s been a considerable delay between updates on the errors with Apple watch pairing. As we’ve mentioned previously there is more than one error involved and specialist teams are working hard to address the root causes of these.

I assure you that all comments about this issue are read, and all feedback given is being escalated on a daily basis.

Whilst we’re working on this, we’d be grateful if you can do the following:

• If you’re new to this thread, please either private message me, or add a reply, and I’ll direct you to a team that can help further.
• If I’ve already sent you this information, please ensure you have spoken to that team.
• Please only unpair and re-pair your watch if directed to by one of our support teams as part of the troubleshooting and investigation of your issue.

I’ll provide another update soon.

Thanks,
JonathanB

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**Update 02/12/2022**

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your continued patience. We’ve seen some great progress towards resolving these issues since the last update. As I’ve mentioned previously there is more than one error involved, and for many of you, your bill cycle will also affect when you can successfully re-pair the service.

Here’s some general steps that should help with common scenarios we’re seeing.

• Ensure that you’ve registered for My3, without a registered online account and password set, the pairing will fail.
• There are some instances where special characters at the start of My3 passwords have resulted in an error. We recommend that you have a strong password that is a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters but avoid beginning the password with characters like /!”£$|\. My3 supports these, but it seems to be causing an issue when this info is passed onto the smartwatch pairing system.
• If you’ve changed your priceplan, upgraded, or are instructed to wait for your bill cycle to complete, you should wait till the day after your new bill cycle starts to attempt pairing. So for example, if your allowances refresh on the 1st, wait till the 2nd.
• Although individual smartwatches can be unpaired from your account, cancelling or removing the add on completely will delay being able to reinstate the service till the following bill cycle.
• As mentioned before, don’t repeatedly unpair and re-pair, the failed requests may cause further issues on your account that delay this being solved.
• I’m continuing to regularly check for anyone new on the thread, just send a reply or private message me, and I’ll link you in with a support team that can help get your specific error looked into and make sure you get the best advice.

Thanks,
JonathanB

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**Update 11/01/2023**

Hi Everyone,

As well as the steps on the last update, we're finding it helps to clear your temporary data from your iPhone before attempting pairing.

You can do this in Settings, Safari, Clear History & Website Data.

In case anyone is having trouble finding their private messages, click on your avatar image in the top right of any community page, then "Messages". If you've posted on this thread, then you should have a message waiting from me with a link to a support team that will help.

Thanks,
JonathanB

[FireVR]

And now this!For a separate issue, I erased my device and recovered it from a backup. My notification style prompt to finish setting up my watch has disappeared and when I tap Mobile Service I don't have the option to try and set it up anymore because apparently Three doesn't support the Apple Watch:   

[Jimblobb]

Still hoping to hear from you. Had this error for a month or 2 now and no sign of a fix. 

[Jimblobb]

So today I spent an hour in the chat speaking to an advisor who put me onto second line support, who then put me through to the tech support team. Who then put me on to the specialist team. I went through explaining the issue (E53305) and giving them all my details every time. 
So frustrating. I’m now told it will take 5-7 days for the system to be fixed. I have zero hope they’ll fix anything. 

[Jimblobb]

So I got a call today from the “specialist support team” they didn’t have a clue. Just asked me to unpair and pair again etc etc. 

What an absolute waste of time and money. 

[FireVR]

Apple Watch & Three Mobile - A Deeper Look.

Ok guys I’ve dug a little deeper. Every time you try to connect your watch various websites are connected to by the Apple Watch application and via this website: https://www.amdocs.com. These sites are to retrieve images, fonts and of course for data capture.

Amdocs

Amdocs started providing their services for Three Mobile at the start of this year and you can read about it here https://www.amdocs.com. However, if you have a life to live, I’ll provide this quote which sums it up from this page:

“Under the deal, which also includes a multi-year managed services agreement, Three UK is leveraging Amdocs’ industry-leading logical data model (aLDM) to build a scalable, open and modular data platform, allowing it to collect, organize, and store data for efficient consumption by all users and generate value from data quickly and easily.”

While this problem appears to have started before this deal commenced, I would imagine they had a period to road-test their services beforehand or maybe they already utilised some of their services, especially as they boast that their platform is modular.

The URL

Of the numerous websites that amdocs.com connects with to pass on your data, one is significant. This connection is likely the only one required to provide customers with the service we require and that is this page:

http://esim-3uk-wsht-prd.ipaas.amdocs.com

Immediately I noticed a flaw in this webpage and tested my theory. I cannot change this URL that the watch app uses so instead I pasted it into my browser and after a while the page failed to load as expected. If it had loaded I didn’t expect to see a great deal maybe some error message or a blank page because it isn’t a page designed for viewing.

The protocol used to connect to this page is http and not https which not only isn’t secure but https is required by Apple when applications are connecting to web pages.

Apple’s Security Requirements

By default, iOS enforces secure data transmission through a feature called App Transport Security (ATS), which restricts the use of HTTP. For enhanced security, it’s advised to use HTTPS. However, if you need to use HTTP, such as when interfacing with third-party sites, you can configure exceptions in iOS. Be mindful that these are termed “exceptions,” hinting at the possibility that this allowance might be discontinued in the future. When submitting your app for review, any exceptions must be justified to the App Store review team.

Exceptions can be specified for individual sites or globally, with a preference for the former for security reasons. These settings are managed in your app’s Info.plist file. It’s often quicker to edit this file as source code rather than using the GUI in Xcode. To do so, right-click on Info.plist and select ‘Open As > Source Code’ for editing.

Crude Test Results

Therefore, using my crude browser method, I tried again but this time I included the missing “S” myself, and lo and behold it connected to the page.

https://esim-3uk-wsht-prd.ipaas.amdocs.com

I can’t help but think that if the web addresses designed to farm our valuable data failed, and if this turns out to be the problem, Three or their partners may have noticed sooner. Sadly, when it comes to our security, it appears they are not so concerned.

As I said in my previous post, I’m a novice nerd and no expert in IT having served 24 years in the fire and rescue service (currently unemployed) but I can reference my above statements and reproduce my experience.

Moreover, one error, I previously mentioned was the following:

Connection reset by peer: This error occurs when the remote server (the “peer”) sends a TCP reset packet to your device. A TCP reset packet is sent by a device to immediately abort the current TCP connection. This can happen for several reasons, such as:

• A firewall or other security tool is blocking the connection and forcibly closing it.
  
• There is a mismatch in the communication protocol between the client and the server.
  

As for the former reason, this could well be Apple’s ATS. The latter reason may be the disparity between HTTP and the required HTTPS protocols which both utilise TCP to which this error pertains.

Despite my dissatisfaction and disappointment, I do hope this helps the engineers debug this issue, saves them time and maybe they only need to type an “S” where it is required, sooner rather than later.

I would appreciate a response to this post because so far I’ve heard nothing from Three.

I will post this to my blog after a period to more easily share with my fellow disappointed customers.

Thank you.

FireVR.

[neilge]

I am having this issue having upgraded recently to an Apple Watch Ultra 2 (it worked on my Apple Watch Series 7). As a runner, it is very frustrating that I have to now take my phone with me when I go for a run. Has anyone had any success with leaving Three as a result of this? I have been with them for almost ten years and renewed my contract in August for a further two years. However, when I did this, the mobile sim for my watch was working of course. I can't put up with this for another 21 months!

All of the various escalations have not moved things on and my complaint filed on November 3 remains unresolved. Three used to have great customer service, what has happened?

[FireVR]

Hey Neilge,

Sadly, I haven’t heard anything back from any of my phone calls or my posts. The only replies I have received are from Jonathan B who is Three’s “guy in the chair” for this thread. He’s never failed to reply and I can only imagine how many messages he must be receiving. I’m assuming he is a person of course which sadly nowadays is naive of me right? I might be sticking up and giving kudos to an Ai, I suppose, jeez. Imagine if a competitor trained an Ai model and set it to work inside of Three’s system here. AI driven cooperate espionage might be thing already. Now there is a sentence I never thought I’d say. Semi-joking aside, this sucks, right? The irony is that Three Mobile who are a large communications company cannot solve a communication problem between communication devices or communicate with their customers who pay them for communication. I’m going to ask Jonathan B to tell me a joke and if he mentions atoms making up everything than we will know he is a GPT. Anyway, thanks for communicating with me and managing to do so with a non-usable communication device. I’m at my wits end with this so I’m heading off to get some bird seed for my last ditch attempt via carrier pigeon. It’s a pity Carlsberg don’t do watches and phones. Three are devolving fast into a laughable joke. 

Best of luck. 

[JonathanB]

Hey @FireVR,

Sorry I've not had a chance to publicly reply on the thread for a while, but I do my best to PM everyone and get them in touch with the support teams. Yeah I've been accused of being a chatbot occasionally, but I can assure you I'm human to the best of my knowledge. 😅

We get the occasional bot trying to post in the community but it's not too hard to filter them out.

I appreciate your frustration with this, I'm not downplaying the issue by any means but the community is a small proportion of our overall customer base, it's disappointing that in some cases here the issue hasn't been able to be resolved by general advice, or on the first chat or call with the support teams, but the number of users reporting the errors is a small proportion of tens of thousands of customers who do have active pairing plans in use.

The number of comments on this thread may be creating a false impression, many community members have posted several times, my replies account for a significant number of responses too, and I initially created this thread in October 2022.

I'm reviewing, responding and feeding back on a much larger spread of issues on the community rather than just Apple Watch pairing though, so I'm sorry this means I've not always been able to respond to everyone immediately when posting about this issue.

If I have missed anyone, feel free to PM me from my profile page too @JonathanB 

Thanks,
Jonathan

[ALTN]

Another 2.5 hours on top of the 10 plus already spent on this. Finally I was offered the chance to email them a screen shot of the error page with the red triangle (despite mentioning this as the issue in every single contact with them). The immediate reply was:

"So I have checked with my team and as issue persists, we will cancel both of your numbers free of cost."

So 2 contracts cancelled, and I gave up £46 of credit on the account just to get out of this. Hopefully will have better luck with O2.

[JonathanB]

Hi @ALTN,

I'm really sorry to hear that the outcome was a cancellation but glad to hear your complaint was resolved in some way.

Thanks,
Jonathan