How to Answer & Reject Phone Calls on Apple Watch
Have an Apple Watch that you’d like to triage phone calls with? Maybe you’d like to answer a phone call on Apple Watch, or decline a call on Apple Watch?
If you’re new to Apple Watch, you may not be familiar with the watchOS software. Whether you own a Cellular or GPS model of the Apple Watch, it can make and receive phone calls using the paired iPhone. If this is your first smartwatch, you may not be used to managing phone calls directly from such a tiny wrist-based device. Since the Apple Watch has internal speakers and a microphone for communication, you’re able to have an entire phone call right from your wrist, making it easy for quick voice calls.
Interested in getting a hang of handling incoming voice calls on your Apple Watch? Read on!
How to Answer & Reject Phone Calls on Apple Watch
Accepting and declining incoming calls is pretty similar to how you’d normally do an iPhone, except for the fact that you will be doing it on a much smaller screen. Whenever you receiving an incoming phone call, just follow the steps below to ensure a seamless experience.
- In addition to the ringtone, the haptic feedback on your Apple Watch lets you know when you’re receiving a call. Simply raise your hand to activate the Apple Watch’s screen.
- Tap on the red phone icon to reject the call
- Tap on the green phone icon if you want to accept the call
- By default, your Apple Watch will use the internal speakers for the phone call unless it’s connected to a pair of Bluetooth headphones like AirPods. To switch the speakers and microphone that’s used by the Apple Watch for the call, tap on the triple-dot icon.
- Now, you’ll be able to manually switch between your internal speakers and headphones for the voice call.
That’s all you need to do to properly answer, reject, and engage in phone calls on your new Apple Watch.
Another neat trick for quickly rejecting a call: place your palm over the Apple Watch screen to dismiss the call instantly. By covering it up during an inbound call, the call will be rejected.
You may also want to learn how to make phone calls on your new Apple Watch. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to go about this. The easier way would be asking Siri to call one of your contacts, but if you want to take the traditional route, you can use the Phone app installed on your Apple Watch to make voice calls too.
Keep in mind that if you’re using the wi-fi/GPS version of the Apple Watch, your iPhone needs to be in close proximity in order to be able to make and receive phone calls. On the other hand, if you own a cellular watch model, you can make calls without an iPhone, provided you’ve activated a cellular plan on your Apple Watch with a supported carrier.
What do you think about answering and rejecting phone calls on your new Apple Watch? Are you using this feature often? Let us know your experiences and tips in the comments.
Nice tip, but doesn’t work. I bought an Apple Watch to use while skiing to screen calls. Phone is in my pocket, Power Beats 2 headphones in my ear…. and nothing on the watch. Sometimes the call showed up, sometimes it didn’t. 8 hours on the phone with Apple Support and still nothing. I ended up replacing the watch and still had the same problem. Ultimately returned it for credit.
I have 3 iMacs, 4 MacBook Pros and always the newest iPhone. The treatment and attitude of Apple Support was, in a word, appalling. I’m really disappointed in the way they handled this situation.
Answering and rejecting calls is a major feature of Apple Watch, it works when it is configured properly.
Unfortunately not all iPhone and Apple Watch are configured properly, or have other issues that may cause the feature to not work as expected. If the problem happened with two different Apple Watch models, it was probably an issue with the iPhone rather than the Apple Watch.