Apple Watch sudden battery drain?

Heya Bluecy_ Thanks. That seems to be working. I disabled Hey Siri on the watch, battery life improved. I’m cautiously optimistic about this result. Battery down only 2% after an hour. Now at least I can use the watch with it’s dumbed-down/muted features. Maybe someday Apple will implement a super-secret, “hey, it’s not our fault” fix and this technological marvel of a device will work as promised. 🙄

Another user with this problem. I have an S4 LTE watch paired with iPhone 11 Pro Max. Everything seemed fine when I initially upgraded my iPhone and paired my phone, but I think it was from the time of the 6.0.1 WatchOS update that everything went wrong for me from a battery life perspective and the 6.1 update did nothing to fix the issue.

I've unpaired the watch and set it up as a new device (not restoring from a backup). I've since deleted every app I can off the watch, and toggled every possible setting (no noise monitoring, cellular turned off, Siri turned off, brightness turned right down etc). And I'm left with a device that is barely usable given the horrendous battery life. I used to get by with an hour on charge in the evening before putting the watch on for sleep tracking, and then an hour or so further charging during the day with the watch on my desk. I can't do this any longer because the watch burns through 10%+ per hour of battery with minimal use and it also takes so much longer to charge than it should / used to.

Last weekend I went for a run with my watch and AirPods. Granted, I was streaming music over LTE, using a bluetooth HR tracker and using the GPS. I started the run with 60% battery and after 23 minutes (I know this because that's how much of my run it tracked) it shut down.

It can only be a software bug, and it's really disappointing.

So like I said before I have a s2 Nike edition, about 2 days ago suddenly had battery life drop to die in about 8 hours of wear, I used to get almost 2 days out of it.

last night prior to bed it was at 30% I put it on late that day. I did the turn everything off and on sequence and also turn off the music refresh play lists I don’t use my watch for music so this shouldn’t be an issue for use for me and today I’ve been wearing it for 6 hours and I’m currently at 96% so hopefully it will stay highly functional and maybe this will help someone.

I guess I'm lucky I have a series 2 with only bluetooth and secondary wifi. My "solution" is to do a hard reboot about every three days, and to eliminate on my iPhone all the notifications I don't care about anyway (of which there were many). I get slightly worse than usual battery life, but nothing unbearable. I did disable music on the watch because it appeared to be the largest battery drain app. But, I didn't use music on the watch so it didn't matter.

I have not tried to rebuild it as a new watch because killing music and the notifications, killing battery sucking apps on the phone when I'm not using them (Tile is among the worst) and rebooting every few days (usually right before I put it on the charger at night) seems to have mitigated the problem. This is a runaway process problem, created by the current WatchOS in combination with the current iOS.

With a series 2 that's close to three years old, warranty won't help me. Apple needs to fix the WatchOS, even if that means "features" they thought we wanted have to be eliminated. Or, offer us an OS for less ambitious people who just want the darned thing to work.

Are you by chance using your watch to unlock your mac?

If so there was a solution that someone found out and posted a few days ago

If you are see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250844998?answerId=251866124022#251866124022

From my experience, I believe part of the issue is a run away process in either the Bluetooth stack or Sync engine, or both. I have caught apps in a perpetual installation state in the Watch app, music being stuck syncing. Clearly an issue with the software. Watch face makes a difference too. More complications requiring sync data can really hammer the Series 5 battery, which they shouldn't. I've read other posts the machine learning process hogging time on newly synced watches as it processes data. Which is why the wiping and repairing of the watch has little effect as your resetting all of the machine learning data every time and the watch has to run the process again.

All of this to say that the code base for WatchOS 6 is terrible, just like Catalina, and iOS/iPad OS 13. Because of that, I'm putting my money on software. With the constrained resources of the watch, it can't afford any runaway processes or inefficient code.

In the end, maybe you do have a bad battery, maybe you don't, but only a genius appointment will settle that question for you.

I found it helpful to have Apple remotely look at the watch first, before going all the way down to an Apple Store:

1. From your iPhone, open the Apple Support app (mostly blue with a small apple in the upper right corner);
2. Select "Get Support" (bottom middle);
3. Select your watch;
4. Select Battery;
5. Chat with an advisor and ask them do do a remote diagnostic on your battery. It's easy and very, very cool how they can connect to your watch thru your phone thru the ether ;-).

Same issue here. I disabled Listen for "Hé, Siri" in my watch settings. This seems to work.

i removed all Music from my watch, and turned off the auto uploading of Podcasts to it as well - that seems to have fixed the issue.

I have not. I shut off phone and watch, restarted phone and watch and it seems to have rectified the problem.. Battery life is much the same as my Series 3 was...

Similar issue for me yesterday. Woke up took phone and watch off charger, both at 100%. Within 2 hours my phone was down to 18% and my watch to 53%. Music (which I never use) had used 54% percent of my battery in the last 24 hours.

Restarted phone

Restarted watch

I think the iPhone update was the issue as it kept saying it couldn't do it overnight and has stopped saying that now so probably did it that evening and then the battery drain started to occur.

Everything back to normal so far but keeping an eye on things and will report back if the issue reoccurs.

What finally worked for me, by accident of course, is that I let the watch charging for 24 hours or more. Then everything was back to normal. I also deactivated just for caution "wake on wrist raise". Today is the 2nd day that watch is back to normal.

did you try the hard reset by pressing down the crown and the button below at the same time, holding them down until the apple logo comes on? For me, that didnt work. I ended up unpairing my watch and repairing it as a new apple watch set up. I didnt use one of my back ups. I still had an issue the following day. I ended up contacting apple support through the app. They analyzed the hardware of my apple watch and since then I havent had an issue (knock on wood). Im not sure if it took time the resyncing to catch up. Or if they may have done something while did analyzed it. the battery still drains some but doesnt die when there is 80% left on the battery.

I spoke to Apple at Chermside and the reception girl said she knows nothing about it but could make an appointment to see a tech. Wait time was 1 hour. I went home and did another hard reset on both watch (3) and iPhone XR. That night the updates came for both phone and watch. I downloaded both and have had no issues since.

Dont know if that helps. My understanding is that Apple techs are working on this.

This is obviously a software problem that Apple refuse to acknowledge. Everyone's watch was happily chugging along getting up to two day's life out of a single charge until the recent software updates.

Getting your watch "repaired" will only cost you money as there is nothing wrong with the hardware of most people's watches (IMHO).

My watch used to get about 35 hours out of a single charge and then it dropped to about 6. Apple couldn't help me (spent almost 2 hours at an Apple store) but worked for me was :-

1. multiple hard power downs of watch and phone
2. multiple unpairing and re-pairing of the watch using the backup to restore
3. upgrading to the latest WatchOS
4. charge the watch and phone overnight near each other

This (somehow) fixed the battery drain on my watch (series 2). It is back to it's usual long battery life. Not saying the above will fix anyone else's issue but these are the steps I took - plus I cursed a lot.

Good luck