(Credit: Eric Zeman)
Modern Samsung Galaxy Watch models are affected by a bug that prevents them from entering Do Not Disturb mode, making it harder to silence your wristwear.
Samsung confirmed the problem in a South Korean community post, first spotted by SammyGuru, detailing that the feature won’t work when you select specific settings. The bad news is that's likely the setup many users choose.
The bug only affects Samsung phone users running the latest One UI 8 on both devices. It appears on the Galaxy Watch 4 through to the latest Watch 8, all of which run Samsung's version of Wear OS.
If you have Do Not Disturb set to Until I turn it off in the watch’s settings, the shortcut won’t work properly. Instead, it activates for a few seconds before reverting back to its previous state, and continues to notify you. That can be frustrating if you’re somewhere where you need your watch to be less distracting.
Samsung confirmed it’s working on a fix for the problem and also provided two workarounds while users wait.
The first is to activate the feature in the Settings, under Notifications on the smartwatch, rather than via its shortcut. The second option is to use your phone to turn on the feature, rather than the watch.
A PCMag team member using a Galaxy Watch 8 paired with a recent Google Pixel phone found that the Do Not Disturb shortcut continues to work on their smartwatch, further suggesting this is exclusive to One UI 8 on Samsung phones.
It’s unclear how long it will take Samsung to fix this problem, so you may need to use one of these workarounds while you wait for a future update.