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When my Mac is turned on, my iPhone / Apple Watch refuse to ping me for iOS Notifications such as Calendar notifications. I get the notification on my Mac but my Apple Watch will not ping me. From what I can tell everything is setup correctly to receive notifications on my phone and my watch but when the Mac is on, it steals notifications. How do I disable this so that my watch still buzzes me even when my Mac is on?

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  • Did you try turning off notifications? Or are you looking for a solution where you can still see them in your Mac? I have no idea how that is supposed to work...
    – Joonas
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 15:51
  • I could be wrong but I thought it was the first device that you acknowledge will stop the notifications from showing up anywhere else. Meaning, if you get the notification on your Mac and you close it (or do any other action on it), your iPhone won't show the same notification. I think that's how it works when I'm notified on my Mac; my iPhone or Watch don't also notify me.
    – fsb
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 16:55
  • Isn't the point of the apple watch to feel the notification on your wrist? If your computer is open, why should it "steal" the notifications from the watch? Doesn't make sense to me.
    – Timothy Shamilov
    Commented Apr 18, 2017 at 21:30

1 Answer 1

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This might blow a lot of people's minds. After spending hours trying to figure this out with no answers online, here's the answer I figured out.

The problem is that Calendar notifications are by default configured to be "Alerts" rather than banners. When you have a notification set to an "Alert" the device you currently have open (in the order of Mac > Watch > Phone) will steal the Alert from your other devices and you will never be notified because it showed up on your Mac. Thus, the trick is to set the Calendar notifications to be Banners rather than Alerts. In fact, you should set all of your notifications for all apps to be Banners because the Alert style breaks the whole purpose of your Apple Watch. The whole point of the Apple Watch is that it's on your body and lets you know when you need to notified. But if you have any notifications set to Alert rather than Banner style, your notifications will be stolen away from your Watch by your Mac.

I'm puzzled by the lack of documentation and information on this subject from Apple.

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