Apple has announced that watchOS 5 will finally include a native application for podcasts. At last we will have an application to listen to podcasts from our Apple Watch without having to carry our iPhone with us. But this is not all, since watchOS 5 will finally allow third-party applications for this same purpose.
No more incomplete applications that in a more or less rudimentary way allowed us to synchronize our podcasts or control them from the Apple Watch. We will have complete applications, or rather, almost completeBecause all that glitters is not gold. Synchronizing podcasts with the Apple Watch will have its small print, and we will explain it to you below. .
Contrary to what happens with iOS, where the repertoire of applications for listening to podcasts is endless, watchOS has not enjoyed this privilege, in large part due to the enormous restrictions that Apple imposed. A fundamental element that will change this fact will be the ability to play audio in the background, something that comes with watchOS 5 and that will give developers the ability to create fully functional applications from the Apple Watch. You can store your episodes on the Apple Watch and listen to them with your Bluetooth headphones.
But there will be something that for now can not be done: streaming from the Apple Watch. You will not be able to use either the WiFi or LTE connectivity of your Apple Watch to be able to choose which episodes you want to listen to on the go, without having to download them first to the internal storage of the watch. To this we must add another important detail, and that is to synchronize the podcasts with the Apple Watch from the native application Podcasts the watch needs to be charged, so the same will almost certainly happen with third-party applications. Thus, you will not be able to download a podcast on your watch whenever you want, only when it is in its charging base and for a long period, since the synchronization process is not excessively fast. But it's not a bad start.