Apple Watch series 5 battery life

So I just upgraded from a series 2 to a series 5. Yesterday was my first full day and about a hour and a half in I was shocked to see the battery at 84%. Today I turned off the noise measurement & after 6 hours, a trip to the gym it’s at 83%. Seems clear what feature is eating the battery.

hi, I had the same problem with battery life of Apple Watch Series 5. What I did. First: reset the Watch by pressing crown and side button simultaneously till the Apple Logo appears on black screen, then release. Second: Unpairing the watch from iPhone, third: install the watch as a new one. Forth: Pairing the watch with the iPhone again and follow the on-screen instructions.

After I've done this, all works fine. The battery life seams to be stable and as long as it is mentioned by Apple.

Good Luck.

hi, Try this:

hi, I had the same problem from day 1 with battery life of Apple Watch Series 5. What I did. First: reset the Watch by pressing crown and side button simultaneously till the Apple Logo appears on black screen, then release. Second: Unpairing the watch from iPhone, third: install the watch as a new one. Forth: Pairing the watch with the iPhone again and follow the on-screen instructions.

After I've done this, all works fine. The battery life seams to be stable and as long as it is mentioned by Apple.

Good Luck.

I gave up. S5 titanium GPS+Cellular 44mm.

I did the reset dance, paired as a new watch etc. I had Apple install the profile on my watch and do all the diagnostics. Sent them the log files and hourly screenshots. The last straw was the worst day for battery life, 9.5 hours from a full tank. My S4 would always get to the end of the day with around 30-40% even after a busy work day and a run.

Following analysis of the logs Apple’s recommendation was to update to iOS 13.1.2 and WatchOS 6.0.1. They confirmed the latter contained a performance enhancement for the watch to address the battery performance issue. I’d already re packaged it and filed for a return by this point. My trusty S4 is back in business. AOD be ******. I lost almost a whole weekend messing around, measuring and procrastinating.

I personally dont don’t think the problem is AOD, noise monitoring or compass. I *think* it’s the way the S5 handles it’s comms. I would frequently notice the red disconnected icon on the screen, indicating that it had lost location with the phone’s Bluetooth. Whenever I checked it status I could see that it hadn’t reconnected to Wi-Fi in the absence of my phon like my S4 would do seamlessly. Instead it seemed to favour trying to connect to the marginal cellular coverage in my area rather than the prevalent Wi-Fi. I am convinced that this behaviour was the cause of my battery drain.

Maybe the software is the fix and I had a properly faulty watch?

Even now, running all the latest OS’s, the S4 still performs the way it always did. No comms issues and he battery iOS lasting as expected.

its a real shame. I have had every Watch version since series 0 and was looking forward to this. The S5 was always a bit of a luxury move for me over the S4 - considering it was only a minor improvement in terms of features over the S4 (in my view).

Heres to hoping the 6 is something special (and reliable) next year. Who knows, I might cave once I see reports that this is actually fixed!

I've been checking mine daily and on Monday before the latest update things went haywire. My usage on my watch, which incidentally is a replacement as the first one was horrendous on usage, was 11 hours 20 minutes usage and 13 hours 3 minutes Standby and I only had 12% battery life left.

After the latest updates on both my phone XS and watch series 5 and doing a forced restart on my watch and a restart on my iPhone are so much better. Tuesday night (because I'm in Australia) my watch usage was 3 hours 10 minutes and standby was 14 hours 51 minutes with 25% left when I went to bed. This means I would most likely have been able to get about 16 or 17 hours out of my watch, which is just right for me. :)

I unpaired and repaired mine, also reset to factory and re-synced everything. I'm running the current update to iOS that dropped yesterday and the watch is up to date. I have not had battery drain issues since I did this about 3-4 weeks ago. A full charge actually will last me nearly 2 days, though I haven't been very active and I still charge it at night after it's around 40-50%. But I'm easily going from 7am to 10-11pm on one charge now. Where as before, like many of you, I was losing 1-10% per hour. Interesting how this is not working for some people. My watch is series 5, 40mm.

I'm sitting here at 71%. Watch off the charger for 12 hours. And worked out earlier today for an hour. Yesterday did a 3 hour run, gps and music. Went to bed after 16 hours with 20%.

Have you tried a full reset of the watch by unpairing it from your phone? What kind of apps are you running, because I feel I use mine more than average and ever since repairing it it's been working great.

PS: I have the AOD active, I think the noise app is disabled. This is the cellular model.

If you have a MacBook or other Mac computer then check activity monitor for TrustedPeers Helper if it is greater than 2 or 3 % then this will start to impact your battery life on Apple Watch , iPhone and iPad.

I had shocking watch battery life less than 12 hours with TrustedPeersHelper (TPH) running at near 100%.

There are a couple of fixes listed on this and other threads and they work but the root cause I believe is your Apple ID Profile.

I have used the fixes and got TPH down to 0% and wow what a difference to my iPad, iPhone and massive improvement on my watch from12 - 40 hours (bear in mind my watch has everything turned off as a result of trying every other fix I could find)

but gradually over several days the TPH started using more percentage and mine is now up to 12% and it is starting to show again on my watch battery life. After yesterdays workout which was 90 minutes I had 55% left but after todays 60 minute work out it is down to 44% - that's still good and I will still get more than 24 hours out of my watch but as TPH demands more and more cpu time the battery life will continue to drop.

TPH - is a process that actually runs on all apple devices perhaps under different names on phones and watches - its purpose is to ensure that all devices using the same Apple ID are to be trusted. The more CPU it is using the harder it is working and the same happens on the watch and phone - on the watch usage time gets larger in relation to standby time which decreases until eventually they are nearly the same and then you have 10-12 hours battery life on your watch.

You can search for TrustedPeersHelper fixes and there are a couple.

On your Mac in terminal type

tpctl validate | head

this may not return which is a good indicator something is wrong - so kill the process if it has not returned after 10 seconds.

then type

rm -f ~/Library/Keychains/*/com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper.{db,db-shm,db-wal}

This clears part of the keychain database - this cured it for me but it obviously is building it back and it is now getting worse again. TPH will restart and the % should be very low.and very quickly become 0%

if you follow up with

tpctl validate | head

You should get after a couple of seconds something like this

{

  "health" : 1,

  "results" : {

    "results" : [

      {

        "accountHealth" : 1,

        "name" : "ReceiverlessPeerValidator",

        "success" : true,

        "tlkShare" : {

          "allPeersCount" : "25",

Logout of all devices from iCloud and then reload in and check battery life - it should show an improvement (better the improvement the greater TPH was running at)

Here's where I'm at with mine (went from S3 to S5, both LTE)

I originally setup the watch with a restore

Was seeing about 1% drain every 4-6 minutes (not noise meter or compass enabled, but using an infograph face

reset the watch and setup as new with no apps

only installed the apps I wanted

Battery was still draining rather fast

Lost 20% during a 1 hour outdoor run (no music)

Turned off the AOD, and now it looks like it's going to last as long or longer than my S3

So basically, I have an S4.

Here's where I'm at

At 6:32pm watch was at 75%. I turned on the AOD. in 46 min it dropped to 70%. So more than 5% per hour. By Apple's estimate the watch should lose 5.5% per hour and that is assuming 1 hour of workout with LTE and GPS, 90 views of the watch, and like 45 min of apps. I literally did nothing for 46 min and lost 5%.

At 7:18 I turned AOD off. Lost 7% in 1 hour 43 min, and I took a call for about 3 min. That seems to be a battery drain way more in line with what is expected. 3-4% per hour when not really doing much.

Also important to keep in mind that I am on wifi this whole time connected to my phone. So I am not on cell service at all.

I'm going with AOD is not all it's cracked up to be.

I had another call last night with Support and they collected the log files from my phone. My battery again was draining about 5% an hour. With my Series 2, it was only draining about 2-3% an hour. Today I turned off AOD and noise detection. So far I've had my watch on for 3.5 hours and the battery is at 93%, a drain of only 2% an hour. So it appears that maybe the AOD and/or noise detection is the culprit in my situation. I'm curious to hear back from Support regarding their findings on my log files. If they say this is normal, I'll be returning the device and going back to my Series 2.

My tests have been very similar. When AOD was turned off for the day, my battery drain was about 2-3%. When AOD was turned on, my drain was more than double that. Either there is a software problem or AOD isn't as efficient as Apple claimed.

So last night I did a hard reboot of my watch, which took about 2 minutes for it to shut down and come back up. I also turned off the always on display and set it to the dimmest setting (which annoys the crap out of me.) However my battery life has vastly improved. I'm glad I didn't have to go to the unpair/repair advice, at least yet. This is really unfortunate and I'm very disappointed with this watch. It feels like it was rushed and there's some obvious glitches. Whether it's the battery/hardware/software remains to be seen. I hope Apple addresses it soon.

I have never seen those two numbers match up, not sure what is going on there. My gut tells me there may be something continuously running in the background. I know it is a pain but if that is the issue an unpairing and fresh pair without restore from backup should fix that.

Definitely don’t blame you for sending it back! You may want to hold out a little and wait for the 6.1 update, or send it back now and wait to see what the reviews are once it comes out. My 40mm Watch 5 was burning battery at around 12% per hour when I first got it. After the 6.0.1 update and a couple hard resets I am now running at around 4.5% an hour. That is with everything on, using the watch as I would want to use it every day (AOD, background app refresh, noise monitoring, etc). That works for me as the goal for my watch is to get a full day and then a full night in theater mode while I sleep with a recharge in the morning. I am now able to do that again. It is tight but it makes it. My Series 4 did it with ease so I am still holding out some hope that 6.1 brings further improvement for battery life.