I have a series 4 watch. I use almost no apps on it. I basically use it to get notifications, track workouts, and glance at complications to see weather etc. Over the last few months when there have been watch OS updates to install, I get errors saying that there needs to be 1GB of free space and it can’t install the update. I go through and look at storage, and I’ve uninstalled literally just about everything possible. There is nothing at all on the watch except the built in stuff, and the music app was showing it was using 2GB of space. For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally used the music app on my watch, and if I did, I wouldn’t have downloaded anything in the app, so I have no idea why it would have 2GB of storage being used.
So this morning after researching this a little bit I tried a factory reset on my watch, did not restore from backup, and once it came back up the music app was showing it used about 200mb of space. So I installed the watch OS update this morning after that, and now as my watch has been on for a few hours after updating it seems to be downloading various apps and things, and now the music app, which has not been launched once, is taking up 820mb of space. Why? It was 200mb a few hours ago after the factory reset, it has sat for a few hours and now it’s 820mb.
The other part of this is, I updated my phone as well, thinking maybe I have some offline albums in the music app and that perhaps the watch tries to keep downloaded stuff from the phone downloaded to the watch too, but after the update I can’t navigate to any downloaded content at all on my phone. I am not sure if this means I haven’t got any, but on my phone with ios 17.1, in the music app on the library tab, there is no downloaded option. If I click edit in the top right, I can see that “Downloaded” is an option that is turned on, but I don’t actually see it in the Library tab.
Curious if anyone else is struggling with this. I feel like these type of “bugs” are to encourage people to upgrade their watch. I would upgrade but have zero other reasons to, mine works fine and still has all the features I want, and nothing that has come out since has anything new that seems like it would be useful or interesting to me.