Apple Watch says it has 4.2gb

It’s most annoying because I just linked my watch 3, 8gb to my new phone, however I haven’t downloaded any apps, songs, or synced any pictures to it.. and it says only 2.2gb available.. if this is the OS they should have thought about that when they put 8gb in the thing.. i can’t tell time with it like normal, every single time I look at it I have to dismiss the “storage full” warning. But I can’t take anything else off of it.. it’s empty..

Apple has chosen to not show you the total capacity. It is showing you the remaining storage capacity after the OS is loaded. This does not leave much for apps and upgrades. The OS 7.2 needed 2.5G free to update and uses 3.9G. That leaves only 1.6G for apps now and future OS updates.

So basically we can use the 3 series out of the box as is and not add anything to it in order for it to work and do future updates. Great.

I wish I could delete native apps like mail, contacts, and calendar off the watch (because I don’t use them), to free up space for other things....namely do an update! But Apple doesn’t allow that. Ready to go back to FitBit.

I have a 3.... you are correct. Brand new it’s fine, but if you need to install update, you have to impair, reset to factory settings, install update, then pair it and rest all apps again. Ridiculous.

So glad it's not just me. This happens with every incremental WatchOS update not just the big series updates.

Watch OS 7.3 showing as 191MB but yet with 2.4GB free on the watch it's still not enough once it uncompresses it. It's crazy to have to go through all this resetting and unpairing and repairing just to install an incremental update.

I thought Apple was about the customer experience? This is certainly a horrible experience from y (the customer) point of view.

I'm glad this isn't just me, but saddened that it is such a near-universal issue. At least understanding it we can jump through these hoops, but the user experience is terrible enough that I wouldn't recommend the Series 3 they are still selling at all. Someday this will force me to upgrade my Watch, likely this upcoming Fall when a new model arrives. But, also, I cannot in good conscience give my current Apple Watch Series 3 GPS to anyone as a hand-me-down, so may also stick it out until Apple no longer supports it with OS updates. That, though, is likely to be beyond just watchOS 7, because, again, they are still selling it. I guess that I'll be redoing things like Apple Pay with each watchOS update for a while...

I can shed some light on what I think is happening further, as someone who pays close attention to the inner workings of Apple devices as a software developer... All Apple devices, since they transitioned to APFS a couple years ago update in a slightly different way than they did before, as I understand it. I've observed some of this since Big Sur brought the same update process from iOS/watchOS to the Mac where you can watch it if desired. In essence, the "preparing" stage is not merely "unpacking" the update archive that gets downloaded. It seems that what it really is doing is close to the full install, using the APFS feature to have space-shared separate volumes to build an entirely new system volume. On the Mac, this is now shown in the "sealed snapshot" that gets booted from, not the actual drive, if you look in Disk Utility. The same is happening on iOS and watchOS, and has for a lot longer. The issue us Series 3 users have is that this process requires the same amount of space for the update that the system itself takes up. The additional 2-something GB that is part of what the difference between 4.1 GB (capacity on my Watch) and the 7-something actual capacity is. The rest is, indeed, temporary system-generated files. With 2 copies of watchOS, our Watches have nearly nothing left. But, this is just my educated guess at what is going on, it may well not be accurate.

One way Apple may be able to "improve" this is to set aside that space ahead of time. But, Number 1: That again would reduce the visible capacity of our Watches to an undesirably puny amount. Number 2: That isn't always feasible, because Apple won't really know how big a new version of watchOS will be ahead of time, especially for the major updates each Fall. Extremely crappy user experience. I am starting to expect that Series 3 will not support watchOS 8 at all, largely due to this. But we'll have to see in June with the WWDC announcements. If it doesn't, then the poor folks who are buying these Watches today will be potentially quite upset.

Unfortunately, no. It seems the only way to fix this problem is to upgrade to a newer version or the 3 like my wife owns, she has 16 gb of memory. She bought hers used after she lost her first edition watch which never gave her a problem updating.

Thanks for your reply.I spoke to a guy from Apple yesterday and he basically said the same thing.it’s not really fair I’ve only had my watch for a couple of years and now when there’s a software update it’s useless!

I’m asking who’s in charge at Apple to recall all the watches with this issue and fix and not lying the people and say all the excuses like the apps installed take already some Gigabytes ( Bulshit )Apple they greedy they don’t care they care to make money money bye

There is no solution. I will check when I get my new watch, see if it has the same glitch. Apparently it’s across all watch OS’s and models, just much more noticeable on the 8gb ones because of lack of space.

I learned that the watch won't show the full 8GB capacity but what GB is available. The problem lies that with the updates. You can only use 1.5 GB for extra applications on the watch or you will not have enough space for updates. You will need to remove extra applications from the watch before updating.

I’m asking myself but the USA consumer affairs doesn’t do anything about? This is a fraud to people who buy Apple Watch, because Apple they know about and they still sell defective watch , and they see on apple community. Unbelievable

I think the Apple Store may not be selling the 3 right now. I have good news, right now, during heart month, you can get a trade in value for the 3 up to $100 depending on the condition of your watch. You can purchase and SE for about $179-$229 with the trade-in!

Just an update, I received my Apple Watch SE and am sending in my series 3. Brand new, booted up, the SE says 26.5 gigs capacity (it’s a 32 gb watch). Safe to say this is across all OS’s. With the OS taking up 4 gigs right off the bat, I would say an 8 gig watch is pretty much useless. Trade it, sell it as fast as you can. Good luck.

I myself have spoken with Apple support a few times regarding this issue and honestly they don’t care!their response was maybe in the next update they will try and make the software smaller,don’t know how that’s going to happen when the other watches have more features!so basically we have all wasted our money and they don’t care at all!