Can I force download a podcast to Apple Watch?
I would like to listed to a news podcast when I run in the morning, without my iPhone. The podcast is released early in the morning, around the time I wake up, so my watch doesn’t have time to auto-download it. After I wake up and have my watch on, is there a way that I can force my watch to download the podcast? It would be a pain to have to take my watch off, go back upstairs, put it on the charger and wait for it to download (as I have no control over exactly when the watch will download it).
When I tap on the podcast (it has the little empty cloud symbol) it begins to play immediately, which I assume starts the download process, though there is no progress bar or indication if it completely downloaded. The last time I tried this, the podcast stopped about half way when I was listening to it.
I wish Apple considered a situation like mine where a podcast is released after regular overnight charging and a person then wants to listed to it from their watch. A simple “Download now” option would address this. I’d be happy to manually download the podcast if Apple gave me a means to do so, and to know it’s been fully downloaded. Giving the watch the ability to play podcasts and music without a phone is great, but not giving us more control over that process, when we need it, is a failure on Apple’s part.
Apple Watch Series 5