Apple Watch Battery Draining

Ok I figured out the problem. It has something to do with a process called TrustedPeersHelper which I think manages the various devices on your account. I noticed this was running a lot of CPU time on my mac so I was researching if others had the problem and found this link (https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/dmbuj5/macos_catalina_trustedpeershelper_always_running/)

I'll summarize since it's not totally easy to follow but basically there are three database files located in "~/Library/Keychains" (you can go to the "Go" menu and select "Go to Folder" and paste that in it will take you there. The files are called "com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper" with the extension .db .db-shm and .db-wal .. it seems for some reason these got corrupted and became quite large (in my case over 15mb each). If you delete them they will be recreated immediately (I'm assuming from scratch without whatever the error was). I then restarted all my devices and my watch is back to normal battery life!

If you want the shortcut to delete the files you can open the Terminal window and paste in:

rm -f ~/Library/Keychains/*/com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper.{db,db-shm,db-wal}

then hit enter and restart everything and you should be ready. The original article where I found this said they had to log into their apple account again but that wasn't my experience.

I also found that this has improved my iPhone battery performance (though it wasn't terrible) but it does seem better now. Also my MacBook seems to be working with less CPU churn.

Hope this helps others.

Hi -- thanks for the reply but this wasn't really helpful. There's some issue I think with the last few updates as I never had this issue before and my settings and apps have not changed. Additionally as I said in my original post if I unpair and repair (from a backup) the device it works perfectly again for a day or two but then reverts to draining quickly.

Update on this. I finally bit the bullet and tried unpairing and repairing as a new device and specifically made the point not to install any third party apps. For the first day or so it was perfect (as was the case when I repaired from a backup) -- woke up the next morning with something like 95% charge left. Was hoping this would have solved the issue but it's been degrading since then. It's not quite as bad as before but seems to be getting a little worse every day. Now when I go to sleep with 100% I'll wake with ~50%. I charged my battery up to 100% again after waking up and by midday it's at 43%. The "good news" is that it seems to be degrading slower than before but it's still going in that direction so it's a small consolation price. It's clearly software as if it were hardware it wouldn't go back to normal for a little while and it's also now clearly Apple's software as I have no 3rd party apps installed any more. @Apple I would recommend getting your act together as I've purchased quite a large number of your products over the years and I was even thinking about upgrading my laptop and apple watch to the 5 (even though I have the 4) but I've been convinced not to waste my money since I don't feel like paying for new gadgets that only half work ....