Apple Watch Can't Do That: Save And Share Photos
Interestingly (and infuriatingly), Apple Watch offers no way to save images on the wearable itself. So if someone sends you a cool picture via text or email that you want to save straight to your Apple Watch, you can’t. But that’s okay, because you can just save it to your iPhone Camera Roll, right? Nope. All you can do with that image on Apple Watch is look at it. It will be on your iPhone in whatever message thread you expect, but to save it, you’ll have to pull out your handset and handle things from there.
But that’s not the worst of it. On Apple Watch, you can’t even share a photo. You can’t forward it in a text or add it to an email or anything. Frankly, it’s downright bizarre that Apple Watch lets you send out hand-drawn doodles and heartbeats willy-nilly, but it won’t let you so much as forward the single most prevalent type of communication media in all of mobile tech.
With a launch product like Apple Watch, it’s usually obvious which shortcomings are intentional update fodder and which are actual oversights. But with this one, it’s not so clear, as enabling photo sharing wouldn’t constitute a huge hit to battery life or performance in general. Instead, it seems like Apple wants to curate the user experience at the deepest level, curtailing expected use cases to force across the new paradigms they’re trying to promote.
It makes sense, but it seems senseless, and everything just ends up being a little more frustrating than it should.