I like that I can play podcasts from my watch when my phone is not near me. But I don’t love how hard it is to manage which episodes are on it. So, two questions:
What is this icon for when I swipe and episode left?
And how do you play an episode that is not downloaded, using the local wifi instead of bluetooth from my phone? The whole house has wifi, so I’d like to be able to clean the house without my phone on me.
Select a podcast app and read the user guide for that particular app.
This is going to vary depending on which podcast app you use, and not all of them support standalone playback. I use Overcast and for standalone to work with it you have to designate a particular playlist to sync with the watch. You can set certain podcasts to add to that playlist automatically but I do it manually. I just add episodes to that playlist.