Watch 3 not enough space to install watchos 7, cant delete anything.

I deleted all apps, music, everything. Then I took off photos, calendars, mail, and everything else possible. Still couldn’t get to the required minimum. I’ve erased all data and reset the watch twice now. I’ve spent at least 6 hours trying different combinations. Shocking that this is happening.

If I unpair and re-pair, restoring from new, will this delete Apple Watch Workout data that was synced to Fitness and Health on iPhone? i.e. Will my running workouts and stats (that were obtained from Apple Workout) be retained in the default Health app in iPhone? Or will these disappear?

Like others mentioned about this upgrade, previous upgrades also took hours for me with numerous technical issues I had to work around. It seems these issues won't necessarily be avoided this time. Is there any good reason to upgrade to 7? I checked the summary page and nothing stands out to me that would warrant going to all of this trouble.

I’m having similar issues and I had to perform a hard factory reset to clear the memory and attempt another install. It is very clear to me that Apple have not thought this update through at all, it contradicts their policy of “making things easy and consistent for the end user” a policy they’ve always been very good at following. @Apple if you’re reviewing these message boards, take note and listen to your users. The updates are far too large, causing frustration and anger, in the process you contradict your own policies around user friendliness and risk alienating your customer base. You need to fix this issue by; a) making the updates smaller optionally pushing through 2 smaller updates instead of one large one, b) ensuring that one of the first actions is to provide easy user actions to clear out cache and memory or by doing this automatically.

Not a happy Apple customer.

1) After my run playlist randomly stopped syncing with my phone, I decided updating might fix it.

2) When I tried to restore from backup after unpairing and re-pairing, got an error 'Restore Failed; Failed to restore with Error: Error Domain=NBErrorDomain Code=0 "(null)";. So I had to set up as a new watch, which meant having to re-tweak all the settings afterwards.

3) So about 1 hour in it was finally ready for the update. I started the download. Estimated time remaining at the start varied between 2-4 hours. It came to an end at about 2 hours. Or was it the end?

4) At the "end" IT SAID CANNOT VERIFY UPDATE BECAUSE I AM NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. BUT I WAS. AND THEN THE DOWNLOAD THAT TOOK HOURS APPARENTLY GOT SCRAPPED BECAUSE NOW IT'S DOWNLOADING AGAIN, BACK AT 2H LEFT.

WTF APPLE???!!!

Seriously folks, go on a vacation while Apple Watch is updating. It's an all-day thing.

I had the same issue with my series 3 watch. The only way to upgrade to WatchOS7 was to unpair & start again from scratch. It took half-a-day and more than one attempt but I got there eventually.

Now I can't set my watch to unlock my iMac. Every time I go into the System Preferences and try to check the setting to enable it, I keep getting a message telling me my Mac can't communicate with my watch

I’m facing the same issue. I can’t believe Apple released an OS to S3 without even checking whether the storage that comes with watch sufficient or not.

Literally nothing on my watch right now. No photos, music, emails, apps except for default apps that I cannot remove.

only thing that I haven’t tried is unpair and pair. But should I go through all the hassle just to install an update? Has anyone done prior testing on series 3 before releasing?🤔

Unpairing, resetting and re-pairing is the only way you can complete the update. It's a pain, you'll have to set up all of your customisations again, including rebuilding custom watch faces, sorting out notifications on your watch (if you have different settings to your phone - which I have a lot of). I'd say I'd got about 90% of it back to normal within a day, and completely back to how I like my settings within a week.

Is it worth doing? I think so. I particularly like the new sleep monitoring function and being able to set up different 'Bedtimes' so that my weekend is different to my working week. I also like the fact that Bedtime now looks the watch automatically during the night so the face doesn't light up if you wear your watch while you sleep.

Bite the bullet and do it. Yes it's annoying and a little short sighted by Apple, but overall it's worth the inconvenience.

I 100% agree with this post!! My Apple Watch experience has been exactly the same and I also find it very inconsistent with the company's standard. This: "making things easy and consistent for the end user", is the reason I spend the money to buy Apple products.

This is all well and good to have a way to get around this. However, I am now on my second update where I have to do this same unpairing approach. Getting an update should not require that much work. Fix this one Apple!

Hockeydad3930 wrote:

This is all well and good to have a way to get around this. However, I am now on my second update where I have to do this same unpairing approach. Getting an update should not require that much work. Fix this one Apple!

We are not Apple

https://Apple.com/feedback

I’ve deleted everything I can, reset, unpaired and paired but still says not enough space! This has taken hours and am no further forward. I am only .1 gb away from having enough but I was in same position last night! I feel like throwing all my Apple products out the window. I had same problem with my MacBook Air and was unable to delete enough without making it useless but still having loads of apps I don’t want but can’t delete! Come on Apple sort this out - we don’t all have loads of money to buy the top of the range models with plenty of storage capacity!

I resorted to re-pairing in the end but it took several hours on top of all the time the evening before trying to delete things to free up enough space! I don’t think anyone from Apple reads any of these posts but it helps a little p to vent your frustrations here!

The problem I have is the last two updates I have had to unpair and pair again my apple watch, that should be a normal course of action to do an update on an apple watch that I barely have anything installed on

Exactly! What’s the point of having operating system which needs more space than is actually available even without having anything saved on the device. Apple have no concept of what it is like to own basic devices which have less storage capacity. And you can bet they don’t actually read these comments!

I suspect that those of us with Series 3 Apple Watches will have to take extreme means every time a new OS update comes out. For sure there is not way I can remove enough data to be able to install the OS update. I'm considering just not bothering upgrading any more. Now to figure out how to get the notification icon off the app because it is pointless :(