If you store a lot of music, photos, and apps on your Apple Watch, you may encounter the wall of 6 GB of storage that comes standard on each and every model. Fortunately, the Apple Watch app on your iPhone will let you see how much storage you’re using and which apps are using the most amount of storage.

Viewing total storage allotment

On the Watch:

  1. Go to the watchOS home screen
  2. Navigate to Settings
  3. Select General
  4. Use the digital crown to scroll to Available (Figure A)

Figure A

You can view this data on either the Apple Watch or on your iPhone.

The Available label will display the amount of storage left on your device, while the capacity will show the entirety of the available space that you can utilize on your Watch.

You can view this same information from your phone by navigating to:

  1. Apple Watch app
  2. General | About
  3. Scroll down to Available

Viewing app storage

The total space available on your Apple Watch is a good metric to know if you need to remove any data in order to support additional apps or music. In order to see what apps are taking up the storage space on your device, you’ll navigate to the following screen on your iPhone:

  1. Open the Apple Watch app
  2. Navigate to General | Usage
  3. Wait for the spinner to stop (Figure B)

Figure B

After the spinner stops, a list of apps will be shown along with their storage usage.

When the spinner stops running, you’ll be presented with a list of the apps installed on your Apple Watch and the space that each of the apps are taking up on the physical device. With watchOS 1.x, this represents the cached images and minor other app assets. It will become more important to monitor app usage when watchOS 2 is released later this year, when apps can store larger files on the device.

Once you have an idea of which app is being the storage hog, you can either remove it from the device or remove its data (in the case of the Photos or Music app) to regain some storage space.

Do you have some tips and tricks for keeping your Apple Watch storage usage in check? Let us and others know in the discussion thread below.