Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches

https://www.jefftk.com/p/verizon-is-about-to-break-our-watches

by jefftk • 18 days ago

154 120 18 days ago

jefftk.com

lowbloodsugar• 18 days ago

Is part of US phone cartel. What you expect?

s3p• 18 days ago

Shaming someone for buying cell service in the United States is just strange

What do you expect them to do, move out of the country for a $10 / mo cell plan?

fragmede6• 18 days ago

Choosing a carrier device without being on that carrier for the rest of your devices would seem to be the first mistake. Treating the carrier as anything other than dumb pipe seems like the issue here. Going with the Pixel Watch LTE and then doing same custom app development might make more sense for the described use case, but I haven't explored the author's use case thoroughly.

NetMageSCW• 18 days ago

How would the custom app disable the native Watch services?

ghostly_s• 18 days ago

Good point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.

DrewADesign2• 18 days ago

Don’t be ridiculous. They could easily use premade products, exclusively, and avoid the inter-provider compatibility problems by deploying meshtastic nodes anywhere they expected their kids to be, and getting them certified as ham radio operators as a backup.

8note2• 18 days ago

you only need a few llm subscriptions i suppose?

anonymars2• 18 days ago

So you blame the victim and also admit you haven't explored the author's use case. Very helpful

fragmede6• 18 days ago

The victim is complaining that they were hurt. I seek to empower them to not be hurt further. What are you bringing to the table? Snide comments?

bombcar2• 18 days ago

Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.

acdha• 18 days ago

I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud team who verified my identity and back to a third person who solved the problem by deleting and recreating the line on our account. Every one of the people I talked to was clearly trying to help but their billing system sounds like it’s someone’s old house primarily consisting of duct tape and stucco.

This is a disappointing contrast to their actual network which is clearly run by people who take running a reliable network seriously with good coverage and latency.

jjtheblunt• 18 days ago

which network?

saghm2• 18 days ago

Stuff like this seems like it might happen in any low-quality identity system (possibly aided by customer support who can't possibly be blamed for just trying shit and seeing if it works) regardless of whether it's based on some hacky version of telephony. I often pick up prescriptions for my wife at CVS, so we had her account linked to mine, but after we moved for some reason they had trouble filling one of my prescriptions, and I had to spend a while on the phone with them. They had filled it at the CVS near our old address but for whatever reason their computer system was not able to cancel that like usual and fill it at the one we had switched to, and eventually whatever "fix" they did somehow made my wife's phone number start receiving all of our notifications. Even more confusingly, a prescription I started on later didn't show up in either of our accounts, but it was still getting filled somehow and would be ready when I went there. After around a year of this something changed in their kiosks for putting in your info to get your prescriptions listed, and suddenly I couldn't get it to show up there either and would need to spend an extra 20 minutes hashing it out with them for a couple months. The most recent time I went there, they finally told me that apparently I had two separate accounts: one at our old address (which I hadn't lived at for over a year) with my phone number, and one at our current address with my wife's phone number but the common prefix nickname version of my first name (think like "Will" for William or "Ben" for Benjamin). Because it was somehow on an account with my name, my phone number, my old address, and literally no email address at all, I couldn't log in and view it in the app, and because it would "standardize" my name to the account that had my current address, I couldn't access it on the kiosk. It seems that whichever customer service rep I talked to literally duplicated my account, put my wife's phone number on it, moved all of the prescriptions we had at the time over, and associated my email address with it, but then left the old account otherwise intact and just waiting for some database quirk to unexpectedly end up assigning a new prescription to. The part that surprised me the most was that the person I talked to at CVS was entirely unfazed by this and had a standard process for merging the two accounts, which means that this apparently happens a lot.

derefr• 18 days ago

In what way are watches with SIMs (or eSIMs) not just tiny cell phones? Or is you meaning that the modern smartphone is itself a “pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks”?

sulam4• 18 days ago

The main way is that literally zero of these watches actually meet the standards that the cell networks require of a cell phone. Every single one of them has a carrier exemption or a lower standard to adhere to, because it turns out that putting a cell phone's RF package into a watch is super hard, both because of size and the various negative effects of the human body on radio signals. This affects cell phones too of course, but less so (remember the iPhone 4 and how we were "holding it wrong"?).

Another way is that watch chipsets are distinct from cell phone chipsets in that they make a variety of compromises unique to wearable requirements. Apple may be an exception here, you can't get a spec sheet for their chip, but for the other providers their wearable chipsets are generations behind anything they sell for a cell phone and are compromised in terms of power. Interestingly even watches (Apple, Samsung soon) that support 5G are running a dumbed down version of 5G that was created specifically to support the wearables and IoT market.

It gets even stranger in software. A text showing up on your watch might have arrived two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text and you can't tell which. The watch often doesn't even have its own number -- it's borrowing your phone's. IOW, it's not a tiny phone doing phone things, it's a companion device trying to fake it.

bombcar2• 18 days ago

As others have said, but also the Apple "watch shares your phone number but not really" where you have a second "real" phone number that actually communicates - reminiscent of how Republic Wireless worked on the Sprint network.

dlcarrier• 18 days ago

That's how most software works, nowadays: https://xkcd.com/2030/

bee_rider• 18 days ago

I wonder what the warranty period on this sort of device is. It’s broken without access to the hub, right? And it’s only 2 years old.

dmd• 18 days ago

It’s one year, and only for hardware defects.

motbus3• 18 days ago

Since beginning of 2025 big corps turned to be each time more anti consumer. They feel quite comfortable. I wonder what happened for them to feel like that.

nxm• 18 days ago

Any actual evidence to backup this claim?

kmbfjr• 18 days ago

Are you serious?

Only in the last week we have Sony deleting paid-for movies. That is pretty anti-consumer.

I realize all of this is empirical, but the term enshitification just didn’t form out of thin air.

replygirl• 18 days ago

just since 2025?

dghlsakjg2• 18 days ago

Well… since then but also before then.

mr_toad• 18 days ago

Pretty sure that phone companies have been anti-customer ever since the invention of the telephone.

genghisjahn• 18 days ago

Well, they are providing a valuable service to society. How much money should they be allowed to profit for providing this service?

bigC5560• 18 days ago

Sounds to me like you just became aware of it in 2025. This has been happening for forever. Keeping with the electronics example, the Phoebus cartel was lowering the lifespan of lightbulbs in the 1920s. The US government seemed to be stricter on it at that time (I mean in the 1920s), but billions of dollars in lobbying will change that over time.

diego_moita2• 18 days ago

Since beginning of 2025

I suggest you to study the birth of consumer protection laws on the beginning of the 20th century, such as the birth of the FTC in 1914. It was a time when milk and beer were routinely adulterated, most meat was contaminated and all sorts of cartels did price fixing [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_Act_o...

karavelov• 18 days ago

So what happened to FTC in 2025 that it’s not doing anymore consumer protection?

tyre• 18 days ago

Reminds me of a recent tweet:

this has been talked about extensively you're just 21

This isn't new behavior. Not by years, but decades.

Hizonner• 18 days ago

Hey, that scorpion stung me!

Underphil• 18 days ago

Honestly, I'm beginning to feel the same at this point. How many stories of people getting burned do we need before we collectively wake up?

mgiampapa• 18 days ago

I feel like this is an edge case where it's less expensive for Verizon to issue a refund than it is to actually fix the problem. Sometimes paying for the problem to go away is the best solution and you get a new thing that works better.

dghlsakjg2• 18 days ago

Bold of you to believe that Verizon will issue a refund or can do it successfully if they want.

teliskr2• 18 days ago

I have a verizon watch only account. I was able to get the new app working, but it was a struggle. I think it worked on the 3rd or 4th attempt. I had to start over and lost all of the contacts that were connected to the watch. Fortunately, there were only a few.

Overall, the Gizmo watch has been nice to have, but it leaves a lot to be desired. It's surprising that there are not better products in this market segment.

Grombobulous7• 18 days ago

The Apple Watch isn’t a better product?

https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-for-your-kids/

fluidcruft• 18 days ago

Any Apple kit for your kids is completely useless if you yourself don't use Apple crap.

teliskr2• 18 days ago

I didn't realize Apple had a kid mode. Of course I see Apple watches everywhere, but I haven't talked to any parents about them. When we got the gizmo 3ish years ago, it was popular with a lot of kids around here. I wasn't hearing of kids using the apple watch. The gizmo is nice in that they can call us and that their contacts are limited. I really don't want to have more features than that. I'm just surprised that it feels like an "unpolished" set of features.

jefftk6• 18 days ago

Not an option, unfortunately, since my wife and I are both on Android.

43920• 18 days ago

Maybe https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/1815501/ ?

anonymousiam• 18 days ago

So the author probably could have migrated if he hadn't used a Google Fi phone number for 2FA. Some banks and businesses (such as Uber) will detect a Google Fi or Google Voice number and not let you use them. Other businesses don't do the detection, but the 2FA texts will never arrive. Like the author, I've got some accounts that I was able to set up for 2FA using a Google account, but 2FA no longer works on them.

colechristensen• 18 days ago

Google Voice? (and other strictly VoIP services) Absolutely.

I've never had a single problem with Google Fi.

Beijinger3• 18 days ago

Try WISE With Google FI

natebc2• 18 days ago

Same, they must mean Google Voice. I've used Google Fi for gosh, 8-9+ years (honestly don't remember, but a good long while) and I've had ZERO problems with anything relating to using it as my cell provider.

jayknight• 18 days ago

Me neither, but I moved a T Mobile number to Fi. It could be different with numbers originally designated to Fi.

saghm2• 18 days ago

I was going to say the same thing. I've been using it close to a decade and I've yet to encounter a circumstance where anything I've used has even seemed aware of the fact that I'm using it rather than a more "traditional" carrier. Conflating both of those would be like saying you need to watch your blood and sugar if you consume a lot of Nestles Crunch bars or Nestle bottled water.

zdw• 18 days ago

Blocking specific service providers in this way should be made illegal.

It's an abuse of market power primarily used to eliminate competition.

jitix2• 18 days ago

How is it eliminating market competition? Uber, etc don’t compete with google voice and similar services.

And its a valid reason for preventing scammers. I am literally tired of scammers on every single app. I still want an open internet but I think ALL phone numbers should be tied to real human identity and geolocation. Yes, it seems dystopian but it’s no different than the time when we only had landlines with verified callers. Democracy is as fine back then, maybe even better.

Some structure and verification around telecommunications will go a long way towards improving the experience for everyone even if it hurts the libertarian part of my brain.

bastawhiz• 18 days ago

I've used Google Voice since it was Grand Central and switched to Fi the month it came out, and I have never experienced what you're describing.

fragmede6• 18 days ago

switching to voice calls seems to help.

snowwrestler2• 18 days ago

Nah, this is not correct. The Gizmo watches work fine with the GizmoHub app, but not the new Verizon Family app. You have to authenticate in both apps.

I have Verizon service and use a Google Voice number as my MFA and it has worked fine for many years: in the GizmoHub app, in the Verizon website, and in the My Verizon app. The only place I can’t properly authenticate is the new Verizon Family app. They just screwed up that new app.

jefftk6• 14 days ago

A Verizon tech called me yesterday and told me that they were not going to take Gizmohub down until they'd resolved these issues. They also walked me through getting set up, including getting me the 2FA code that was not coming through. Apparently delivery of 2FA codes to Google Fi has been an issue for them. After our call I saw that this 2FA code (but not the earlier codes) did actually come through under "Spam and Blocked", so if others are having issues I'd recommend looking there.

tolerance• 18 days ago

This is the sort of web page that the street's been missing. The comments aggregator is interesting. Not to mention the hover-overs for the related posts.

Grombobulous7• 18 days ago

I hate to blame the victim here, but anyone in the 2020s buying a carrier-branded piece of cellular hardware should have expected this sort of thing.

We already learned this lesson back in the days before the iPhone when phones had carrier logos printed on them and GPS apps cost $5/month.

Apple Watch Kids Mode is what you want. If the watches cost too much grab a used one.

The author complained about the high price in the original review but they didn’t really spend enough. They bought a crappy telecom knockoff of an Apple Watch. You get what you pay for.

garbagewoman• 18 days ago

They’re not a victim, they’re just being slightly inconvenienced.

jefftk6• 18 days ago

Apple watch only works if a parent has an iPhone, and we're both on Android.

Beijinger3• 18 days ago

Google Fi has become shit anyway. Much too expensive and if you use it too much abroad, they cut you off.

Any recommendations for alternatives?

dmitrygr• 18 days ago

Prediction: absolutely nothing will happen about resolving this. Ever. And eventually they will find a line in the ToS allowing this and point to it — some paragraph that says they may cut any line of service with no notice at all you you still owe them your firstborn and the payment for the rest of your contract, and also you now need to change your name to Verizon.

hansvm3• 18 days ago

And owe them royalties for infringement on the name "Verizon."

Barrin922• 18 days ago

"Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts)."

"Our older two kids, Lily and Anna, are ten and eight, and are mature enough that they're able to cross streets and handle unusual situations. They can go to the park or a nearby friends house on their own, but we do need to know where they are"

"Meet Gizmo Watch 3, the smartwatch that introduces kids to wireless technology safely. With an SOS button, voice and video calling4 and text messaging,"

After clicking around the article and the watch page and desperately trying to figure out why a 20 bucks casio F91 isn't doing the job, all I have to say is, thank god I am a millenial instead of being raised by one

corpoposter• 18 days ago

Seems like you are getting caught up on the watch form-factor. If you think of it as a stripped down cell phone for a kid you don't want to have a cell phone yet, this product makes perfect sense.

jefftk6• 18 days ago

Definitely! But the form factor is really important: since it's strapped to their wrist they don't lose it. Classmates with phone-shaped phones seem to loose theirs a lot.

Barrin922• 18 days ago

like you are getting caught up on the watch form-factor.

I'm getting caught up by the full fledged surveillance kit. Give them some independence and freedom instead of this a watch with an SOS button, we survived before ~2010

cwyers• 18 days ago

```The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise this up the chain: they need to push back the deprecation date.```

There's no way a CSR has any power over this.

DrewADesign2• 18 days ago

But they can, and do. escalate problems. It’s not like there’s a side entrance for people with problems that a CSR can’t solve.

cactacea• 18 days ago

Yes, they solve the problem that you called the company.

merk1etree• 18 days ago

Only sporadically.

Reluctant to switch 2FA.

xtiansimon• 17 days ago

“Family does not yet support cases where you have Gizmos as your only Verizon lines of service…”

Curious if the c-suite knew of this corner before they approved the change. Cherry on top that customers might have to buy more services to continue their lifestyles.

snowwrestler2• 12 days ago

If anyone is still following this, it is July 10 and my GizmoHub app is still connected to my kid’s watch, and the map and messages still work fine.

Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches

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