Apple Watch series 5 battery life

Well, of the past 8 1/2 hours I have “usage” of 3 hours 24 min, and the rest is “standby”. I have no idea what to make of that since I haven’t done a thing with my watch except wear it since I got up.

Every time you raise your wrist or the screen actively turns on that is considered Usage. So essentially even though you have not “used” your watch the screen has been fully on for 3 hours 24 minutes. Not AOD, that does not count towards “usage”. Make sense?

Yeah that is not my experience. When I said my usage and standby time is the same, I meant - the same. And I know I am not raising my wrist and looking at the time the same amount of time as it has been non active. Also, it did the same with AOD on or off.

Yeah, that I have never seen and it does sound wonky. That could be a glitch with the reporting or worse something is running in the background causing the Watch to always be active. Which would crush your battery.

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. :)

My S4 is showing different usage and standby.

but thats not what is eating my battery, something else is, and its eating my watch storage too.

I have no apps installed and my photos on the watch are taking 65 MB and music is taking 56MB and all the rest combined will not pass half a gigabyte including music and photos. BUT my available storage is at 0 bytes. My usage is 12.1 GB.

my watch has already told me to delete my 56MB music to make space because it is full. But make space for what and how much more space does it need? And will this 56MB really make a difference.

I have no other apps installed other than what comes with the watch itself. So what is using 12 GB of my watch storage??

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.

Then again maybe not. I did ANOTHER erase and reset - repaired and set it up as a new watch. The TrustedPeersHelper process no longer runs 100% (a hard reboot did not fix it). I verified - no process was taking significant CPU time. But it is still draining at a rate of 7% per hour, which leaves me with 14 hours doing NOTHING other than wearing it. I will probably be returning this watch - have spent more than 30 hours diagnosing, talking to Apple Support, profiling, resetting, reinstalling, etc. for something I paid CAD1100 for.

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.

Only problem is I am at day 12.. So I sure hope Apple releases a fix soon. I had one day where I got 15 hours and still had 60% over... Then I put it on the charger, went to bed, woke up, put it on my wrist and it was back at 10% per hour. So I am rather confident this is a software issue and not hardware.

Have owned my first ever Apple Watch (Series 5) for a week now. First couple of days the battery drain was terrible. Watch didn’t last the day. Suddenly it settled down and I was getting amazing battery life in excess of 18 hours - until today. Phone was charged at 9am and died sometime around 7pm. The only thing I did differently today was use the built in workout tracking utilities instead of the third party Workouts++. Methinks perhaps that drained the battery? It’s hard to know but I definitely think it’s software not hardware related. Hope watchOS 6.1 comes soon with a fix. My wife is ready to throw hers at the wall......

As I mentioned earlier, my watch 5 battery has been down to 12-15% by bedtime. Searching for some cause of this, I found Background App Refresh was turned on. Just as an experiment, I turned it and AOD off. Last night when I went to be later than usual, my watch 5 was still showing 42%. Clearly this is only one data point, and I should have changed only one variable, but to me it’s encouraging to see this number for the first time. Today I’ll turn AOD back on and see what happens.

Yeah as I noted in an earlier post, I personally turned of ALL background app refreshes, I turned off cellular, then I turned off ALL activity notifications and sound and AOD and anything else that makes this a smartwatch - in fact, I even turned on airplane mode to switch of the WiFi and Bluetooth radios. It drained slightly slower, at a rate of 8.5% per hour. That is still less than 12 hours with it being just a step above power reserve mode - so no, in my case, none of that helped. I did note a correlation in battery drain between my new iPhone 11 Pro and the watch. The 11 Pro got terrible battery life - worse than an SE. But that one day when I got the good battery life with the watch, my phone was at 82% at the end of the day.

Looking at the logs from the watch when instrumenting it, I saw hundreds of lines from various services per second - so this must be app chatter that is draining both in my case.

...and an interesting update. NOW my watch says battery is still at 100% after 10 hours’ use. Last night it actually went flat in the middle of the night even though it said battery was at 99% when I went to bed. Something seriously screwy is going on!

Same here!

after 3 hours wearing it the battery said 100... couple hours later I was at 90 and I was happy that its fixed!

than the rapid decline came in and in the evening i still averaged at 5 percent per hour...