Apple Watch sudden battery drain?

I have a v4 watch, which usually uses about 35-45% of the battery all day (5am to 8pm - 15 hours) and yesterday, and today, it used 90% in about 10 hours). I read up, yesterday, about what to do, and turned this and that off (and did not have any of the symptoms I heard about anyway), and it continued today. Both day I discovered two weird diagnostic events, which I hope were sent to Apple.

I am the latest iOS update from the first day it was released, and this only started happening on 11/15/2019.

I’ll try turning them both off and on; but like the others said, the watch is pretty worthless if it dies in the middle of the day.

So to follow up. I haven’t gone through a full day but I’m now at 12.5Hrs Standby and 3hrs 20 min usage. 53% left on a Series 5. AoD on. Took a phone call from the watch and regular notifications. Flipped to cellular a couple times. So average usage. I’m seeing same or slightly better battery. Best I’ve seen is ~24hrs on the Series 5.

Unpairing will inevitably cause a battery drain as apps and data sync back and forth to the watch. Those suffering from the battery drain, I would suggest checking to see if apps are installed or if data is trying to sync. I’ve seen an app hang installing on my watch before that hammered the battery.

My watch is about 6 months old and a few weeks ago it started draining. I have tried everything in the string of posts. It’s down to 12 hours. It’s under warranty and I’m planning to go to the Apple store.

Like I said above, 10% over 13 hours might be excessive.

There is tab called dictation. It is where you can speak into the watch to reply to a message and it will convert your speech to text. I had also turned that off because I thought maybe that was causing battery drain. I decided to turn stuff back on because nothing I did made a difference. That was the only thing I turned on before my battery life came back. Scared to change anything else!

I’ll make my point again. You SHOULD NOT have to be turning anything of to get the advertised battery life. This was never an issue from WatchOS 2-5. Watch OS 1 had some issues initially.

I believe the issue is a run away process in either the Bluetooth stack or Sync engine, or both. Watch face makes a difference too. More complications requiring sync data can really hammer the Series 5 battery. The biggest drags on my watch battery has been while away from the phone, not on LTE, or when music or an app needs to sync/install. I have caught apps in a perpetual installation state in the Watch app. So for me, no third-party app get on the watch now, no music as I don’t use it, Meridian with Date, Weather and UTC clock, everything else default.

It really is a nuisance, I have not travelled with the series 5, but I don’t see how I can without having to charge it in an airport. Even with AoD turned off. My LTE series 3 never had this issue.

Last weekend I reset the Watch as new, and reset as new an iPhone SE, too. Both with the latest updates, and both as "vanilla" (no addition of any other than native apps), too. Used for the weekend, average drain at about 9-10%.

Reset the Watch as new, and repaired (as new) with my main iPhone X again. Been using it for three days, average drain at 9%. Really don't know what to do. Should I wait for another iOS/WatchOS updates, or send it to Apple for examination and replacement? What makes me hesitant, is that other users got even two replacements, and the problem was persisting.

This is a bit of a long-winded response, but I may have figured out a solution to this based on talking to someone who used to work for Apple.

I November, I noticed a similar issue with my watch, with the device shutting down at 20%, but then later shutting down at 50% if I kept the watch on the charger past 100% for a long period of time. The only thing I could think of was that being a beta tester on the new iOS software had broken something, but that should have been caught by someone else.

After months of working with Apple, including sending in the device and no issue being discovered (they even replaced an 11 month old Apple Watch 4 with a Series 5), I mentioned the issue to someonewho used to be a Senior Advisor. His advice: Back up everything to iCloud and reset the phone. At this point, everything would need to be synced from iCloud, and I would need to download my apps again. The idea is that there is a corruption somewhere in the phone's software that is causing this (it makes sense, as the new watch did not have an issue until a few days in).

Other than my watch battery "dropping" sixty percent during the first night (which I suspect was a correction on the software's part), the battery issue was resolved within a day.

Unfortunately, I have started having the 20% issue again after almost three weeks, where it is charging at 1% a minute, so I am going to try resetting it again and see what happens.

Very similar to my experience, Music is draining my iPhone in the background. My iPhone and watch both dies overnight which never happens and are draining battery much more heavily than previously.

I updated my watch software and it seems to have returned to normal. It was update 6.0.1

What worked for me is disabling Listen for "Hé, Siri" on my watch. I am on 92% of battery after 8 hours of use. Could you try that? Curious if that might help for you as well.

ATTENTION ALL

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This issue is due to a WatchOS bug.