Apple Watch series 5 battery life

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......

Just a general observation from my side. I have been through three Series 5 watches - all 40mm, first two were cellular, last one is GPS. I have tested all updates and combinations of resetting etc. The one thing I noted is that with any of these watches, I'd use it for the day and get x% battery drain per hour. I would put it on the charger at night, sleep, wake up next morning, take it off and put it on my wrist at 100%. That day it would drain at a rate of y%. That night same thing, take off, charge, wake up and put on. It would drain at a rate of z%. x, y and z can vary anywhere from 3.5% (good) to 11% (horrible). The mere act of charging it and putting it back on my wrist had a way bigger effect than any watchOS updates.

Thanks for the info JT73, sadly looks like the AOD is the cause of the battery drain. I found it hard to believe it wouldn’t have an impact on the battery life.

How couldn’t it?

Cellular.

I have a series 4 and since the software updates, the battery drain is if I'm lucky, leaves me with 10% charge after a day at work. I've done all the things that are suggested...stop app refresh etc.

After a week with my Ti44mm, I'm afraid I'm returning mine as well. Each day this week I'm down to less than 10% before I go to bed and I am not doing anything on the watch other than getting notifications. My S4 would generally be between 50-60%. I guess I'll be going back to that.

Something is definitely wrong here.

Yes I picked up my Apple 5 series Tuesday and used it three days and I’m very disappointed with it because of battery life. I’m sending it back for my refund. I was just wearing it from 6:00 am to 2:30 pm it had 10% battery life left and I wasn’t even putting use on it

The senior advisor I've been working with just called me. They had put a profile on my Series 5 last week to do some tests. He said today the engineers are aware of a problem and expect to fix it in an update. He didn't have anymore info than that but it's somewhat encouraging to get an acknowledgement of the problem. I guess time will tell, but hopefully not to long because my return window with Amazon closes in a couple weeks.

My S4 is only wifi, and i have this same issue. I did everything including as someone suggested disabling reminders. Still i can barely make it through one day as opposed to two says and a spare 20%.

My watch is also on watchOS 6.0.1

i also noticed that my iPad Pro 9.7 and iPhone x are also experiencing battery drain despite iOS 13.1.2

So this is my last update. With AOD on yesterday, I managed to be at 25% after 32 hours. Apple definitely fixed something because I was originally at 10 hours. I don't particularly need AOD on except when I'm working out, but it was nice to be able to have it on with no issues.

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...

3.5% is perfectly within specifications. That will give you 28.5 hours of use, or with some activity dropping to still above 18 hours which is what they promised. My issue is that mine drops at a rate of 8% per hour. That gives you less than 13 hours - way less than the 18 they promised.

Underwhelming update. I uninstalled the beta profile and installed the final version of 6.1. Got a measly 10 hours off a full charge which included a half hour bike ride. Charged at 3pm, to bed at 10pm after cycling with 53% charge remaining, battery drained by 1am. The beta was actually better than the final version. We don’t get the cellular model in NZ so it’s not just a cellular issue. I have 44mm. Wife has 40mm. It does seem to be a 44mm issue.

Sounds like there is some issue with the phone as most people rave about how much better the battery life is on those flash new 11’s.

I would get Apple to run some diagnostics on the phone to see what’s going on. Hope they can find something for you!