Investigating the Continuity Camera and the 'Unlock With Apple Watch' Allegations

Continuity Camera lets users do things that were never possible before with a webcam. Despite meeting all the system requirements listed by Apple Support, Continuity Camera in wireless mode frequently stopped working on podcaster Niléane’s Mac. She had to figure out how to fix this issue.

Niléane for MacStories:

Continuity Camera became a feature that I need to work reliably. Sadly, it doesn’t. Half of the time, apps like Zoom and Discord on macOS could not see the iPhone SE in the list of available cameras. This meant I had to fetch a Lightning cable to manually connect the iPhone. If I was unlucky that day, and that didn’t work, I would have to completely reboot the Mac. If I was really unlucky that day, and even that didn’t work, I would end up joining the call without a camera. Despite meeting all the requirements listed by Apple Support, this problem just kept happening on random occasions. I had to find a fix for this bug, or at least a way to work around it… I truly wanted to make the wireless Continuity Camera setup work. So, I started investigating…

MacDailyNews Take: Niléane postulates that the ‘Auto Unlock with Apple Watch’ feature seems to be in involved with a background system service that shares responsibility for the Continuity Camera feature. If you’re having the same problem, the simple fix is explained in the full article here.