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.