Apple watch series 4 battery drain about 15% per hour without any active app

If battery life on your Apple Watch is a problem, I have a few suggestions that can help.

1. Choose a dark/minimal clock face. Since the watch can wake up whenever you move your arm a certain way, choosing a dark clock face can take advantage of the OLED screen technology and save battery life
2. Make sure to close background apps. This can be done by pressing the side button once and sliding the apps to the left then pressing the red “X”
3. Turn down your screen brightness. In my experience my Apple Watch can be seen in direct sunlight even with the lowest brightness setting
4. If you really need too, turn on power reserve when you aren’t actively using the watch
5. Turn off walkie talkie
6. If you believe it is a hardware issue, contact Apple and ask them to take a look at it

Hope I could help!

My wife's watch has the same issue. We are very technical IT people and this entire situation is ridiculous. After spending a very protracted amount of time with Support, running programs and reports which we sent to Apple, we have been told that this is a software issue and they "are working on it". It should be resolved in an upcoming update. No projected timeframe for this update. It's very interesting that this is only impacting a set number of watches. I have the same watch and get two days from a charge. We've been basically told that we will have a completely useless watch until they get around to publishing a fix in a future update. I've been an Apple customer for decades. I would expect more from the most valuable company in the world. This message string dates back to April. They should have fixed this or replaced the watches by now. They obviously have a systemic issue with a set number of watches and don't appear to have any sense of urgency in resolving it.

You might want to wipe it clean and start all over again.

What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your Apple Watch, or buy one from someone else - Apple Support

Don't load the backup. It will be a minor PIA reconfiguring the watch but the data is safe (it's duplicated in the iPhone).

Set up and pair Apple Watch with iPhone - Apple Support

jakub898 wrote:

I hope so. Do they read this forums?

The only Apple employees who regularly read this forum are the Hosts, the folks who run the forums. If you want Apple to hear suggestions, use the feedback page:

Product Feedback - Apple

If you want technical support from Apple, use the Contact Support link at the top right of every page of the forums.

Tried all of the following advice so far and non seem to work for me.

Just gonna list it down so others can try and hopefully one of the advice might work for them.

• Hard Restart Apple Watch
• Reset and Setup as new
• Let the Watch drain till 0 and charge it back up to 100%
• Let the Watch charge for 2 days
• Turn off Hey Siri in the Apple Watch
• Turn off WiFi in Apple Watch
• Delete the Noise App

Not sure if there are more but please add on to the list if you guys come across anything else that works, this will help readers to save some time looking though the comments I hope.

My Apple watch battery issue has resolved itself through a few changes that I made:

1. Deactivated "Wake Screen on Wrist Raise". That made a significant improvement.
2. Turned off the auto-update feature on an app that ports Apple Health data (from my running) to Garmin Connect and Strava. It now is set to manually update and that also improved battery life.

I’ve been having this same issue for a month now. I noticed it after the last software update.

Contacted support yesterday. They ran analytics on it and advised me the battery cells were fine. As I basically only use this watch as a timer for work, I hardly do anything on the watch. I told them I’d done everything everyone else above had tried, and the same issue has been happening (side note- if they can run analytics to see what’s up with the battery, can they not also tell how the watch is used and determine that there is in fact some problem when the thing only stays charged for about 6 or so hours?!).

I was told I could take it to Best Buy for a “genius” to look at it or send it in to a repair center (and if they found no issue would just send it back).

Im wearing it today and am going to have concrete picture proof that this thing is not working as it should. When it shows my 10% remaining later this afternoon, I’ll be contacting support yet again.

As per apple, the watch gets connected to your iphone either through Bluetooth, wifi or cellular connectivity.

So if your phone is not nearby and the watch cannot get connected through Bluetooth (the most preferred mode for connectivity and battery saving mode), it will automatically search for wifi network and connect your watch to your iphone through wifi. If even wifi is not available, then it’s connected through your cellular network on the watch if its activated.

what i have seen is, even if i turn off the wifi, the watch gets connected automatically over wifi once it looses Bluetooth connectivity.

also apple lists the following for automatic wifi connectivity.

So all in all, theres no way to switch off the wifi permanently unless apple realizes this and resolves this through an update.

And for the same reason i think my same series 4 watch but only gps version has longer battery life than the cellular version as cellular version keeps switching between wifi and Bluetooth.

Let me know what you guys think of this

I find that when I have the brightness set too high it just eats the battery like there is no tomorrow.

Also do you text a lot? or use Walkie Talkie?

They both gobble away at the battery.

Do you gets lots of notifications?

Unpair and re-pair, setting up as a new watch. Do Not reload the backup, leave it as a vanilla watch with just the default apps, and test for a few days. You can configure your email and iMessage, they shouldn’t cause problems. When you have seen the basic performance start adding your other apps one at a time until you find the culprit. It might take a few days because each step takes time, but I’m confident you will get a result.

Apple sent mine back saying there is no issue as well, yet people all around me say they get double the battery life. Did you buy it at Best Buy? When you say trade in, does that mean you will just receive a credit for a later date?