Streaming Music on Cellular with an Apple Watch

Yeah, I’m one of those crazy people who pays the $10 + tax monthly fee to use my Apple Watch on cellular. I honestly don’t use it that much, but I still love to have it and can’t bring my self to cancel the service. I primarily use it when I’m out running and don’t want to bring my bulky phone with me to still be connected to the rest of the world. I use it for streaming music on Apple Music and also want it for emergency purposes, in case I fall and get hurt or am a victim of a crime. One of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with is that I don’t seem to have the strongest cellular connection near my house. This doesn’t really make sense to me because I live in the middle of my city (my neighborhood is literally in the very center of the city). It does have a lot of tree cover however, and I just chalked it up to the Apple Watch Series 3 having a weak cellular radio. I was getting constant pauses in my music for buffering and it was driving me crazy! But I recently discovered a solution to this problem that made me feel very silly, but it’s something that I feel like people can easily overlook.

Follow these steps:

Cellular Settings

First go to the Settings app on your iPhone and click on the Music app settings.

Then scroll down to Cellular

Finally, make sure that High Quality Streaming is unchecked. This will allow your Apple Watch to change the quality of the music stream depending on your cellular connection. If you have High Quality Streaming on then it will ALWAYS play the highest quality bitrate even if your cellular connection can’t handle that amount of data and you will end up with a lot of buffering. Once I turned this off I had zero buffering and I couldn’t even really tell that the sound quality was lower on my 1st generation Airpods.