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…