Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches | Hacker News Reader

Verizon is about to break our Gizmo watches

jefftk.com

154 pointsjefftk120 comments

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.

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

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

Try WISE With Google FI

The money transfer app? Works perfectly fine.

Abroad? With Google Fi?

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.

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

Where I live (Durham, NC) Google Fi's MNO is T-Mobile so they're effectively the same.

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.

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

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

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.

The problem is that scammers juice engagement numbers and everything right now makes money via user engagement. The platforms are incentivized to not punish scammers, spammers, etc. one ounce more than they can manage without pissing off their users.

That’s why platform providers should not be the primary rule makers; there is a fundamental problem of incentives.

Its a market positioning thing. I will pay platforms that reduce my daily friction over those that don’t. You may not. The overall market sentiment will determine which companies win.

I’m saying this as someone who moved 100% off of public cloud storage recently and who has self hosted my own email from 2010 to 2017.

Phone numbers is one thing where I want less privacy. I personally can vet but it’s still super annoying. Non technical users fall for scams all the time. I literally want people’s IDs be linked to phone numbers. I’m literally TIRED of screening calls even though Apple made it easier recently.

Agree to disagree, sorry.

Edit: I want every phone number calling me to be linked with a physical ID and address (whether individual or legal entity) and accessible via a single button tap. In 2026 there is no reason for someone to call someone anonymously.

As someone who also self-hosts, I absolutely do not want phone numbers tied to verifiable personal information. Why? Because then every major "service" will make phone registration a requirement. It's bad enough as it is.

Look around, its basicaly impossible to sign up or freaking buy something online without handing over all your most personal information, even when they literally never call you.

that hack I've wanted to do is to set up myself as a phone company and then be able to give out different phone numbers to different people so that if only one person has that phone number than I know where that phone number got leaked from. if it is being handled digitally and everything gets forwards, calls to 0001 are from my family, 0002 is friends 0003 is work, 0004 and up are given to each business that wants to contact me. If 0042 gets called by a company that isn't the one I signed up 0042 with, then I know their database leaked.

There aren't enough phone numbers to make this work. There are only ~5.7B phone numbers in the NANP that can be assigned to individuals [1] and these countries have >400M people, so it's just ~14 phone numbers per person. Which works if we each have a couple, but not if we start handing out many per person.

[1] 10B ten-digit numbers, less prohibited ones like area codes starting with 0 or 1, the 555 exchange, etc.

Sigh. Yes, you're right. Like IPv4 address space and private jets, it's a limited resource and it won't work the same as you can do for email addresses. Though, maybe adding an office extension number to it might work.

> How is it eliminating market competition?

Verizon is the company powering the service for these watches, and is the company not sending 2fa to non-Verizon customers.

Tieing it to a real person will juat make the pressure to hack real peoples accounts much higher. Just maje a way for a user to cost them money if irs spam. Like deposit a quarter to call if no complaints for a month you get it back. If they report you youlose the quarter. Spam phonecalls gone in a month

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.

switching to voice calls seems to help.

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.

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.

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.

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.

which network?

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.

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”?

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.

What do you mean by "carrier exception"? Exception from policies those same carriers set up decades ago?

Not exactly. Early cell watches were not going to meet the existing carrier standards and so they received specific exemptions from the carrier to operate on their network. Over the years the carriers have created requirements that are specifically for these devices, that are less stringent than what they require for a cell phone on their network. They still give specific exemptions if a watch is "close" to meeting a requirement but can't quite get there.

Restricting users to "approved" devices seems to be a US thing? I'm fairly sure that anything that's capable of connecting with the right frequencies and protocols can connect to any UK network.

This isn’t the case for these watches in the UK as well, as they only work on certain partner networks, but I’m unsure whether this is due to the GP claim or something else.

Can't quite speak for UK, but in EU cases I know about its because some (popular) watches need special provisioning process for eSIMs and getting that proprietary software requires carrier to beg our favorite mega corps for provisioning software and do extra work.

It's not like phones where pSIMs were relatively brand agnostic, were back to per-hardware BS.

I have a Pixel Watch 2, it seems that only certain carriers (typically not MVNOs) can set it up with an eSIM that will present as having the same number, but any MVNO that provides eSIM setup via QR code should work to provision via the connected phone.

I can imagine Apple being less inclined to allow arbitrary eSIMs on their watches, preferring to only support the case where the eSIM is guaranteed to support the "correct" presentation.

That seems more likely to be due to the device being network locked, rather than the networks disallowing them?

So yeah, "standards" they themselves set up which decimated market competition on US markets.

How nice of them to make an exception.

A few years ago, I signed up for an Apple Watch eSIM plan (which is a special type of eSIM plan that Apple make cell carriers agree to offer as an add-on to a normal cell subscription for your iPhone, and there is no other way go get an eSIM for it).

I then started regularly receiving phone calls (to my iPhone) intended for someone else. At first I thought it was a wrong number or an old number and kept telling them to remove this number. Buy the calls kept coming and I eventually I dared to ask what number they had dialed. And it wasn't a cell number I recognised.

After contacting support for my carrier, what I figured out was that the Apple Watch eSIM has its own phone number, for some reason, but it's not one you're supposed to know about; as an extension of your phone's subscription, the Apple Watch eSIM notionally has the same number as it. But they were calling the secret number associated with the eSIM, somehow. And I think there was a problem in the number routing table somewhere, because I think this number may have been in use with another cell carrier, and the calls only went to me when calling from my network?

Absurd nightmare situation.

Or opportunity for fun

Surprises you didn't give that secret number out - could have been fun for yourself (or your close friends or family) to be able to call direct.

I wonder if you could even use it for texts or notifications that only go to the watch ?

the Apple Watch eSIM has its own phone number, for some reason, but it's not one you're supposed to know about

Not a secret if you have AT&T. The watch and its phone number are listed right there in its own section on the bill.

Absurd nightmare situation.

Not unique to Apple Watches, or any other device.

I have a T-Mobile hotspot that was assigned a recycled phone number. It gets several text message receipts each day for someone's Venmo purchases.

> two completely different ways depending on whether it's an iMessage or a regular text

Isn't that true for any device? not just watches?

A "regular text" would be an SMS and those use Signaling System Number 7 telephony stack.

iMessage uses application level protocols sitting on top of IP in the standard OSI model?.

SS No 7 only roughly maps into OSI model, the equivalent application layer would use MAP - Mobile application part.

> SS No 7 only roughly maps into OSI model, the equivalent application layer would use MAP - Mobile application part.

Well yeah only the OSI stack actually maps onto the OSI model, or should be expected to

> various negative effects of the human body on radio signals

I was under the impression radio waves couldn’t interact with biological matter in any meaningful way. Can you share more about this?

Matter of any kind interacts with radio wave on some level. You might be thinking of how radio waves in the bands and power used for cellular don't have a negative health impact. But they still 100% interact and the human body, being both dense and conductive, absorbs radio waves beautifully.

Of course they interact, but to my knowledge this interaction is not meaningful when discussing biological functions.

I think you may have switched the "of" and "on" when you read the original post. They're saying that the human body can negatively affect radio waves, not that radio waves have a negative effect on the human body.

The body both absorbs RF, meaning there has to be a safe absorption rate (SAR) and creates impedance with it. It also creates radio shadows. What’s more, larger individuals have more of this effect. At Fitbit there was a guy who I’ll refer to only by his first name — Tim — who was our first port of call for whether or not our prototypes were getting the job done, RF-wise. He was a very large human. (proportionally speaking — he was also very fit!)

I've found my calling. Is this "Tim" role open now that he's left?

Fitbit is owned by Google now — are you sure you want that job? ;)

Radio waves are not ionizing radiation, so they aren't directly cancerous in the same way as say, x-rays or UV light (UV light is about the threshold for this), but they are still absorbed by water in tissue, which heats it up slightly. There is a limit to how much this is safe, and so radio safety standards impose limits on the average power you can use to transmit in most consumer devices. The standards are stricter for something intended to be carried in a pocket or worn on the body.

You get far more of a heating effect from just standing in the sun.

I was under the impression radio waves couldn’t interact with biological matter in any meaningful way.

You don't have a microwave oven?

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.

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

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.

The Apple Watch isn’t a better product?

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

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

You 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.

I 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.

I 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.

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.

Kid mode might be newer than 3 years ago, I certainly haven’t been keeping track.

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

The Fitbit Ace LTE is Google’s kids watch, although it wasn’t yet available when OP first bought watches.

With Google moving their smartwatch efforts to the pixel brand I'm worried about longevity here. It also has a lot of the downsides of the Gizmo: 20 contacts max, texting only through the app, can't interact with friends. If I'm going to get new ones for the kids I'll probably do a TickTalk or Cosmo that don't have these drawbacks.

I almost started talking about how I think the best solution is really just a customized/locked down normal smartphone but I’m not sure how helpful that is to the discussion.

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

```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.

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.

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

Yes, support agents never escalate anything, they are mendacious slaves.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

> “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.

"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

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.

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.

>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

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.

Any actual evidence to backup this claim?

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.

He'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.

just since 2025?

Well… since then but also before then.

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

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

Potentially lots of money, potentially none, but they should be honest about the capabilities and lifetimes of their products and not make that profit through bait-and-switch and other lies.

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.

> 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...

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

Hmm, could it possible be a change in government's policies, more friendly towards corporations? Nah, I am probably inventing conspiracy theories... /s

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.

Hey, that scorpion stung me!

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?

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.

Only sporadically.

Reluctant to switch 2FA.

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.

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

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

Is part of US phone cartel. What you expect?

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?

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.

How would the custom app disable the native Watch services?

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

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.

you only need a few llm subscriptions i suppose?

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

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?

Your "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?

Yes 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

a clearer option is a tort, no?

I 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

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