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Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches
- lowbloodsugar 3mo agoIs part of US phone cartel. What you expect?
- s3p 3mo agoShaming 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?
- fragmede 3mo agoChoosing 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 3mo agoHow would the custom app disable the native Watch services?
- ghostly_s 3mo agoGood point, consumers should all simply develop their own apps instead of buying a product.
- DrewADesign 3mo agoDon’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.
- 8note 3mo agoyou only need a few llm subscriptions i suppose?
- anonymars 3mo agoSo you blame the victim and also admit you haven't explored the author's use case. Very helpful
- fragmede 3mo agoThe 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?
- ImPostingOnHN 3mo agoYour "seeking to empower" looks a lot like victim blaming in this case. Maybe if you didn't claim the problem was a mistake on the part of the victim, rather than unearned mistreatment by the carrier? Or if you provided any solutions or ways to solve the problem other than, don't do the totally normal things for which you were victimized?
- fragmede 3mo agoYes I suppose my position of "Verizon is a pile of shit heads and you're an idiot for trusting them" could be been phrased better
- 8note 3mo agoa clearer option is a tort, no?
- anonymars 3mo agoI don't know how to fix the social contract that "the things you buy should work and not be rug-pulled" but I certainly refuse to normalize the idea that "the issue here" lies with the author and not Verizon
- bombcar 3mo agoCell 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 3mo agoI 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 3mo agowhich network?
- saghm 3mo agoStuff 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.
- slipperybeluga 3mo ago[dead]
- bee_rider 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoIt’s one year, and only for hardware defects.
- motbus3 3mo agoSince 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 3mo agoAny actual evidence to backup this claim?
- kmbfjr 3mo agoAre 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.
- cj 3mo agoHe's probably looking for evidence of "Since beginning of 2025". (I'm curious too) Feels like we've been on the same train for over a decade.
- replygirl 3mo agojust since 2025?
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoWell… since then but also before then.
- mr_toad 3mo agoPretty sure that phone companies have been anti-customer ever since the invention of the telephone.
- genghisjahn 3mo agoWell, they are providing a valuable service to society. How much money should they be allowed to profit for providing this service?
- Hizonner 3mo agoHey, that scorpion stung me!
- Underphil 3mo agoHonestly, 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 3mo agoI 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.
- dghlsakjg 3mo agoBold of you to believe that Verizon will issue a refund or can do it successfully if they want.
- teliskr 3mo agoI 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.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoThe Apple Watch isn’t a better product? https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-for-your-kids/ https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-for-your-kids/
- fluidcruft 3mo agoAny Apple kit for your kids is completely useless if you yourself don't use Apple crap.
- gmueckl 3mo agoYou literally can't set up am Apple watch for kids without a parent-owned iPhone. It's the kind of vendor lock in thst all other companies get immediately chastised for, but Apple always manages to get a pass. I hope they pay their marketing teams adequately for those amazing ways in which they twist public perceptions.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI don’t like that aspect either, to be clear, but the majority of American parents use iPhones and don’t have any plan to leave the platform, and there are other kids smartwatches on the market not made by carriers.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI am sure there’s a decent product not made by a carrier, like the Fitbit Ace LTE. To be fair, that specific product wasn’t yet released when OP got their Verizon watch.
- anonymousiam 3mo agoSo 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 3mo agoGoogle Voice? (and other strictly VoIP services) Absolutely. I've never had a single problem with Google Fi.
- Beijinger 3mo agoTry WISE With Google FI
- natebc 3mo agoSame, 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 3mo agoMe neither, but I moved a T Mobile number to Fi. It could be different with numbers originally designated to Fi.
- tolerance 3mo agoThis 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.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoThey’re not a victim, they’re just being slightly inconvenienced.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jefftk 3mo agoApple watch only works if a parent has an iPhone, and we're both on Android.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Beijinger 3mo agoGoogle 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 3mo agoPrediction: 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.
- hansvm 3mo agoAnd owe them royalties for infringement on the name "Verizon."
- Barrin92 3mo 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 3mo agoSeems 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.
- jefftk 3mo agoDefinitely! 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.
- Barrin92 3mo 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 3mo 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.
- DrewADesign 3mo agoBut 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 3mo agoYes, they solve the problem that you called the company.
- refulgentis 3mo agoYes, support agents never escalate anything, they are mendacious slaves.
- merk1etree 3mo agoOnly sporadically. Reluctant to switch 2FA.
- xtiansimon 3mo 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.
- snowwrestler 3mo agoIf 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.