Podcast Applet Does Literally Nothing

[1madman1]

I can play Podcasts from my watch - but only if I'm in range of the phone - it refuses to actually download anything. What's the point of that??? I'm trying to get away from the phone.

I cant for the life of me get any Podcast content pushed onto my Watch S4. It's set to "custom", which seems to indicate it should download the most recent three releases, but it does literally nothing. The podcasts area in Watch applet on the phone it just states the status of the watch is "waiting" indefinitely - can leave it charging for 2 days and literally nothing changes. If I try opening the downloaded area in the Podcast applet on the watch it seems to lock up and I need to force quit. Restoring the watch did nothing. I see no way to actually manage your own content like you can when syncing your phone to a real computer, it's designed to do it all for you.

Any suggestions other than see the Apple Store? They're completely useless zombies.

At this rate I'll probably end up hunting down another 6th gen iPod nano and sync with iTunes - at least that actually worked. Unfortunately mine died.

 

[1madman1]

Here's a fun one. If I'm near the phone, turn the phone off, then try playing a podcast from the watch - hoping to force it to buffer locally on the watch - it spits out the message "unavailable, please open this link on your iPhone".

 

[tkermit]

Podcast syncing has never worked reliably for me either.

 

[mk313]

Not sure what's going on, but I can confirm hat it's not supposed to work like that. It usually downloads the episodes directly to the watch.

 

[filteq]

My watch will sync the episodes you select in the watch app while charging but even that is not very reliable. I have turned to 3rd party apps that work much better. Try an app like Overcast if you want more reliable and configurable experience.