The Apple Watch is a smart device that is occasionally too smart for its own good, dimming your screen with automatic sensors that make it impossible to read. How do you brighten up your Apple Watch when it dims itself at the wrong time? If your Apple Watch’s sensor is the culprit, you can fix the brightness by covering up your phone for a few seconds and tapping the display. Doing so should allow the sensor to readjust to your conditions and automatically brighten the screen. In most circumstances, that’s enough to fix the issue. If that doesn’t help, don’t despair! There are other steps to try. Once you’ve tried to give the sensors a soft reboot by forcing them to reassess the lighting conditions near your watch, it’s a good idea to restart the watch. There’s a reason this is a frequent early step in most troubleshooting guidelines. Restarting your watch gives it a fresh chance to operate as intended. One way to force the screen to brighten is to increase the ambient lighting near your phone. The simplest way to do this is to shine a light on it. The sensors in your Apple Watch are tuned into the ambient lighting around your device and automatically adjust the screen’s brightness to account for that lighting.
Don’t panic if you notice that your phone is not adjusting to the bright flashlight, don’t panic. How to Manually Adjust the Brightness on your Apple WatchYou can manually adjust the brightness on your Apple Watch using either the settings on the watch itself or your iPhone. To do so, follow these steps: Adjusting Brightness on the Apple Watch:
Adjusting Brightness on the iPhone:
Sometimes, devices misbehave because they are out of date. To check to see if your Apple Watch may be missing the latest update:
Cool Things DownAn overheated watch will act up. If you suspect that might be the culprit, remove your watch and turn it off completely. Put the watch in a cool, shady spot and let it rest for at least 5 minutes. Turn it back on and check to see if the sensors are working by testing the automatic brightness by the first method described – cover the face with your hand for a few seconds, move it away, then tap the screen. Change Perspective – How to Change Apple Watch Displays for Better VisibilitySometimes, your environment is the culprit. The default dark face may be harder to see if you are outside in bright sunshine. In that case, you can elect to change the settings on your Apple Watch to make it easier to see even in sunny spaces. Switch the background of the phone’s face to white, increase the text size, enable bold text, and increase the time your phone face is awake to allow you time to inspect it. To adjust the settings on your Apple Watch’s display:
Work Around the Dimness with VoiceOverVoiceOver is a solution for overly bright environments. When the screen is appropriately adjusting to light levels and isn’t bright enough to compete with the light in your environment, consider trying VoiceOver. This accessibility feature allows you to navigate with gestures and reads aloud each item on the screen. Turning VoiceOver on:
Simple VoiceOver gestures:
How Do I Fix an Apple Watch with a Black Screen?If the issue is a screen that won’t come on, leaving you with an unresponsive field of black instead of a functional smartwatch, you can take several possible causes and simple steps to rouse it back to life. Check the ChargeWhile it sounds obvious, frustration sometimes results in overlooking the simplest solutions to our challenges. If the screen is unresponsive, try charging it first to see if it rouses. VoiceOver and Screen Curtain IssuesScreen Curtain is a display setting that will leave you with an all-black screen. If it’s turned on, it will keep your screen black until it’s turned off again. This feature can be helpful in situations where you don’t want it to light up. Nobody wants to be blinded by an Apple Watch in the middle of the theater. To ensure that it is off, open your Watch app on your iPhone, select Accessibility, then VoiceOver, then toggle the switch next to Screen Curtain off. That should turn your screen back on for regular use. Reset the WatchMuch like turning a watch off and back on again can unstick challenged sensors refusing to adjust to changes in your environment automatically, a hard reset can resolve issues of failing software causing your watch’s face to fail to display. While not common, it is possible for the software on your Apple Watch to crash. A hard reset effectively unsticks it, shutting down the processes it’s failing to complete and starting it over fresh. To complete a hard restart, press both the digital crown and the side button on your watch at the same time. Hold them down until the Apple logo appears; this can take up to 30 seconds. Check for UpdatesA black, unresponsive screen could be the result of outdated software. If your watch has not been able to complete recent updates, it may be failing due to bugs or failed patches. Using your iPhone, you can check for and update your Apple Watch to ensure you have the most recent software version.
Contact Apple SupportIf you have gone through all the possible troubleshooting steps listed above and your screen is still too dim or refusing to come on, your best solution is to reach out to Apple directly for technical support or repairs. |