Apps Podcasts in watch-only mode?

[daroga]

With the imminent demise of Pebble, I'm starting to do some investigating into the Apple Watch. I'm playing catch up here and most of what I could find on Google regarding this question seemed to only be about the original AW, not the more recent Series 1 and 2.

Is there a way to get podcasts on the Apple Watch to play without an iPhone? I think Downcast, et al., allow some form of control through the watch, but I couldn't find anything definitive if there was an app (any app) that let you push a podcast or two to the watch like the music app does for a workout.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

 

[Der Keyser]

With the imminent demise of Pebble, I'm starting to do some investigating into the Apple Watch. I'm playing catch up here and most of what I could find on Google regarding this question seemed to only be about the original AW, not the more recent Series 1 and 2.

Is there a way to get podcasts on the Apple Watch to play without an iPhone? I think Downcast, et al., allow some form of control through the watch, but I couldn't find anything definitive if there was an app (any app) that let you push a podcast or two to the watch like the music app does for a workout.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Unfortunately not yet. Apple has decided podcasts on the wath is not good for you, so it's unsupported. And so far no 3'rd party dev's have exploited the opportunity to be the first and only native podcast app on the watch in untethered mode. I'm rooting for a Native Downcast or plex App on the watch that can sync podcasts wirelessly.

 

[cazlar]

Former Pebbler -> AW here too ;-)

At the moment, it is possible, but not a very good experience.

One way is to use iTunes on your computer to download the podcasts, set them as music files rather than podcasts, add them to your synced playlist, then sync them over.

There's also an app called Watch Kast that can transfer audio files over to the watch, though it isn't integrated with a podcast app, so there's a few steps involved to get files transferred over (see also https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/watch-podcast-apps.1924053/ where I wrote a review of it).