Apple Watch sudden battery drain?

I have a series 4 watch that was working great. Bought the new iPhone 11 and paired with the new phone. Now the battery drains on the watch by 5:00 pm each day. I’ve unpaired/repaired, restarted, updated software, removed all watch apps and turned off all options that may use power and it still runs drops about 10% per hour.

I took it into the Apple genius folks. They ran a diagnostic on the battery and said it was good. So sounds like it is a software issue.

open to suggestions...?

Thanks G35Driver. Followed this advice and fixed the issue! Many thanks. This is a good solution. No doubt Apple will do an update to prevent the problem in the future but my Watch 3 is back to normal. Cheers

My Apple Watch 3 was performing well until recently. Yesterday it did not even last till 4p.m. and was on battery reserve. My friend who has Apple Watch or Apple Watch, stated that her watch does not hold the charge like it used to.

i wore watch from 5:30am to nearly 8pm and showing 66% baterry. Maybe a little better after update. This is after turning most of auto background refresh off too. It never was an issue before even with background refresh

my diagnostics logs were pretty noisy but have magically vanished now after restarting a few times. I’ve disabled everything making the watch just a watch and nothing else. I had a full charge it dropped to 1% after 6hrs and stayed at 1% for another 4hrs then died. Apple what have you done? And wtf are you doing about it?

after following advices my Watch 3 returned to normal but yesterday started losing again. Died around 7 last last. Today Im losing around 10% per hour. I think now a trip to the Apple Store is calling. Will advise the community what I find.

Watch OS 6 has cured my watch's battery drain problem.

Apple are annoying when they don't fully test software before they roll it out and then don't acknowledge their errror and try to fix it. The people at the Apple store were giving me bogus stories and wanted me to upgrade my watch. Totally uneccessary.

Still can’t go through my day (series 4, 6.1) without recharging. I’ve done all the things suggested. I just wish Apple would say something, then push the fix. A watch I can only use for part of my day isn’t a useful device. Especially frustrating given it used to last almost 2 days on a charge before updating to 6.x

Mine was the opposite of that. I was ok until my watch reset on its own. Then it was down to maybe 12-14hrs of life. It’s taken over a week and maybe 13.2.2 to get back to nearly a day worth of battery.

The combination of the hard reset and software update worked well for me for a few days, but it’s all gone haywire again in the last couple of days. I’m again experiencing relatively rapid battery drain on both my phone and watch. I’ve given up and reverted to my analog watch!

Disabling Siri did nothing. Re-paired watch as New and nothing has changed. Hard reset and everything else that I’ve tried has done nothing.

All I know is that since updating watch to os 6.**, battery has been horrible. On top of all that, updating my iPhone XS to iOS 13.**, battery on my phone is equally as bad!

So, in 7 hours of “light use” today, my phone is down to 59% and watch is at 54%!!!!

How about it Apple?

I've a suspicion the problem is somehow links to a synchronisation issue somewhere. Randomly, and I'm wondering if this is linked, when I click settings on the watch, at the very top my name is displayed but to the left rather than my photo being displayed it just has my initials in a gray circle. I swear it used to have my photo (the same photo I click into setting on my iPhone that I've associated with my Apple ID). For whatever reason it doesn't anymore.

It's a long shot, but anyone else who has suddenly experienced their battery life becoming significantly worse, are their Apple ID photos showing on their watches in settings?

Appreciate the Responses; And ...

As much as I am a fan of Apple products, and appreciate the various anecdotal information; the fact is that, all of a sudden, “we” are having to modify what has worked on our various watches for months (or in my case even years), so address a problem of unknown origin, and a problem that Apple should recognize, admit and tell us they are fixing.

It should not be necessary to do any of the things mentioned, because, without doing those things, the watches were performing just fine until two or three days ago.

My v4 watch, has now used 14% of its battery in the first 2 1/2 hours since I put it on this morning, and 30 minutes of that I didn’t even have it on while I was showering. I haven’t played any music, and I turned off some of the things that had been running for MONTHS without this effect.

Normally, I use about 35-45%, a day (14-15 hours), which works out to a high usage of 3% per hour. Now, I’m using 6% per hour, and that is without music, and with my phone within 10 feet at all times.

I use my iPhone and my Apple Watch in my business, and don’t have time to be resetting everything, wiping out all the apps, starting all over, putting in all of my passwords and reconfiguring the entire system anew — which would, moreover, affect how my iMac and my MacBook Pro work.

This is Apple’s problem to fix.

I agree with this assessment. It IS Apple's problem to fix. They should not be expecting the average users to put up with substandard performance out of the box, or waiting X number of days for it to get better. The S5 was terrible on day one, 10hrs at best. The average user should not have to get their new product and then go about turning all of the useful functions off, especially when those functions are exactly why they bought the watch. It's not a good user experience and should never have gone out the door like that.

My watch reset was yet another software issue. I had turned my phone off to replace the screen protector and when the watch reconnected to my phone it was forced into a wipe situation. One minute it had the time, the next the Apple Logo and the progress meter. And having to reactivate the eSIM on it was a bonus kick. Needless to say, I'm very weary of restarting my phone now.

I to use my phone and watch in my business, and I totally agree. I don't have time to wipe and reload constantly. It's ludicrous of Apple to think people are OK with that.

Had same problem, series 2 watch iPhone 7. Jury still out on whether this recommended fix works. But, I know what would work - because I have same problems with iOS 13 on the IPhone - let us revert to iOS 12 and the prior version of the watch os, and don’t rerelease buggy operating systems. I love Apple products, but there is no way in **** i’m going to replace either of these with Apple products if this problem continues - even if they were steeply discounted. Apple needs to admit it messed up, offer an across the board revert w/o nuking the device, and then fix the OS.