Verizon is About to Break our Watches

Two years ago I bought a pair of Gizmo watches for my kids (review). There's a companion app for texting and configuration ("Gizmohub"), and Verizon is moving everyone over to a new one ("Verizon Family"). But the new app doesn't work for watch-only accounts like ours yet, and they're still saying they're going to turn off the old app on July 6th. 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).

I first got the notification that Gizmohub was going away as an email on 2026-06-10:

Since Gizmohub is not a very good app, I was initially pretty excited about this. Unfortunately, when I tried to switch over I got an error that my phone number was "ineligible":

If instead of using a Verizon login I used the "social" login (which some people online reported success with), it tried to send a text to my Google Fi account to verify me, which wouldn't show up.

On 2026-06-17 I talked with Verizon support's virtual assistant for a while, and then an associate for half an hour. They were not able to resolve the problem, and said that Verizon Family does not yet support cases where you have Gizmos as your only Verizon lines of service. They said they'd follow up with me by email when they sort this out, but I never received anything.

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.

I called again on 2026-06-19, and the rep said this was their third or fourth call today from someone who had a gizmo but not a Verizon smartphone. That seemed high to me, and I might have misheard. They said they're working on fixing the problem, it will be at least 4-5 business days, and they won't take down Gizmohub until Verizon Family is working.

I called again on 2026-07-02, and the rep said this was a known issue. They took my information, gave me a ticket number, and assured me that someone higher up in the Verizon support system would reach out to me within 24hr. (Later I got an email saying 48hr.) Unlike the previous two reps they wouldn't commit to this being fixed before Gizmohub would stop working.

It's now been 48hr, and I haven't heard anything. While normally I would be understanding about longer response times over a holiday weekend, here I am not. It was entirely Verizon's decision to set a deprecation date immediately following a holiday. The new app still doesn't work for me, the reps say it's still not working for many others, and on Monday morning we'll lose the ability to text our kids.