After the WatchOS update to 11.6.1, drafts dictated on the watch stopped synchronising to the iPhone, as shown by the text remaining in italics.
A reboot of the watch cured this.
But is there a less drastic way of getting synchronisation going again?
Continued to work OK, post WatchOS update, for me. I’m not on the iOS or macOS betas, in case that’s material.
It happened again, this time spontaneously rather than after an update.
A workaround that so far seems successful is to use a temporary expendable draft for dictation from the watch. Then if synchronisation gets stuck, you can trash that draft from the watch and create a new one.
I’d be interested to hear what, exactly, you are seeing in steps here. Sync between watch and phone is very dependent on OS-level scheduling and is not as predictable as sync between iPhone-Mac-iPad.
For example, you can’t just create a draft on the watch and look at Drafts on the phone and expect it to immediately show up. In ideal conditions, yes, that happens, but it depends on a lot of factors like battery life, network connectivity, etc.
To over simplify, if a change is made on the watch (like a new draft), the watch app says “Hey, watchOS, here’s a change I want to send to the iPhone.” In ideal situations, that happens right away, and the phone wakes up Drafts on the phone and say “Hey, look at this change!”
In less than ideal situations, the Watch may wait to deliver that message to batch it with changes from other apps to save battery. Or if the phone isn’t current nearby, sit on it. Of if the battery is low on the phone, not send it, etc.
Same the other way, pushing changes from the phone to the watch.
Sometimes, one or both OSes have a bit of a mood and just don’t care to talk to each other for whatever reason…which is why a reboot helps. It’s like telling them to go walk around the block and work out their difference. This isn’t usually necessary, it’s usually just a temporary glitch, but happens.
If this is happening repeated…with the expectation that the change don’t sync “immediately”, I’d love to know steps to reproduce, in case there’s a way I could smooth it out.
Thanks for the reply and the description of what’s happening. I’ll keep an eye on it and try to report more detail if it happens again.
My usual workflow is for keeping a diary. I have a permanent draft for this (each month) which I edit on my iPad. There is another more temporary draft which I add to from the watch and phone. Once I have dictated several lines into that from the watch or phone, and viewed on the phone (which helps to ensure that what came from the watch is propagated), I cut the content on the iPad, paste it into the permanent diary draft, and tidy it up from dictation errors. The temporary draft is then empty apart from the title line, ready for more dictation.
So I am not creating new drafts on the watch, just appending to one there which already exists. That is where sync occasionally jams up, as shown by italics. My watch and phone are always within Bluetooth range of each other, and usually well charged. In case it’s relevant, I always keep the phone in low power mode, but rarely the watch.
As well as sync from watch to phone sometimes getting stuck, there’ve been a couple of cases of a different problem, where I’ve entered text on the phone or iPad, and it has disappeared when I look on the other device. This may be a general unreliability in iCloud sync. I’m grateful to say that Drafts versioning has successfully allowed me to recover in these cases: I have been able to find a version on the input device with a suitable timestamp, and copy the lost text from there.