How to Find a Misplaced Apple Watch with iPhone’s Ping My Watch

If you’re an Apple Watch user, you should know about a convenient feature for iPhone that helps you to easily find a misplaced Apple Watch. Much like how you can ping an iPhone with Apple Watch to find an iPhone, you can now go the other direction too, by pinging your Apple Watch from your iPhone, which will cause a sound to play from the Apple Watch.

Pinging a lost Apple Watch from iPhone is super easy, but curiously enough, the feature is not available by default on iPhone even after it has been setup and paired with an Apple Watch. Instead, you have to manually enable this feature first, and we’ll show you how to do that, and how to use this handy ping feature to help find a misplaced Apple Watch by using your iPhone.

How to Find a Lost Apple Watch with iPhone and Ping My Watch

Before you can ping your Apple Watch with iPhone, you have to enable the Ping My Watch feature on your iPhone first. Here’s how to do that, and how to use Ping My Watch to find your misplaced Apple Watch:

1. Open the “Settings” app on iPhone that is paired with Apple Watch
2. Go to “Control Center”



3. Scroll down to locate “Ping My Watch” and tap the (+) plus button to add it to your Control Center on iPhone



4. Now open Control Center on iPhone, and tap on the newly added “Ping My Watch” button that looks like an Apple Watch with waves coming out of it



5. Listen carefully, as your Apple Watch will be making a pinging sound, allowing you to help locate it

Ping My Watch works great to locate an Apple Watch that has been taken off, lost, or misplaced, but you know it’s nearby or in the same general vicinity. Maybe it fell into the great abyss of couch cushions, behind a bed, under a chair, into a laundry basket, whatever the case, as long as it’s vaguely nearby, Ping My Watch will allow you to trigger a loud audible pinging sound on Apple Watch so that you can easily find it.

If you enabled Ping My Watch on the iPhone and you still can’t find your Apple Watch, you might need to go a step further and use the Find My feature to locate your lost Apple Watch, which will also be necessary if the Apple Watch is not actually anywhere near you.

Prior to the introduction of this super handy Ping My Watch feature on iPhone, which requires iOS 17 or newer on iPhone and watchOS 10 or newer on Apple Watch, the only solution to tracking down a missing watch was using Find My to track down the lost Apple Watch, which certainly still works as well, but pinging is so much quicker and easier, accessible right away from Control Center on the iPhone.

If this feature generally feels familiar to you, it might be because a very similar feature has long been available for Apple Watch users that allow them to ping a misplaced iPhone using basically the same feature, but in the other direction. Now it goes both ways, allowing you to find and ping either the watch or the phone, whichever is missing, or whichever you need help locating.

Have you ever misplaced your Apple Watch, only to find it easily with the Ping My Watch feature and your iPhone? Do you have another preferred method to track down a lost Apple Watch? Let us know your experiences with this feature in the comments.