Battery Indicator Incorrect on Series 5 Apple Watch

Same here. Never had issues with my Series 2. Had it for 2 years. Almost a year after getting my Series 4, it started sticking at 100% & dying without warning. Sold my 4 a couple of months ago & got a 5 from Apple. Just over a month later, battery issues started. Right now I charge for a half-hour when I get up, a half-hour with supper (because it will die unexpectedly if I don’t), then 45 minutes before bed. I’ve heard to try factory resetting my iPhone & watch without using backups but I sure don’t want something else to go haywire in that process. Sure open to suggestions though!

And...same problem over here. Got my Series 5 about a month ago. It was working great for 3 weeks and then suddenly one day this started happening. After being fully charged, it stays at over 80% for the first 12 hours and then starts going down from there. Without exception when it reaches 40% on the indicator, it dies. No power at all. I recently set a timer and it holds a charge for nearly 20 hours under normal use conditions. I tried hard resets of both the phone and watch, but I did install from backup on both. The issue persists. I also installed the most recent ios update, no change. Would love any advice on this aside from hard wipes of both devices. Thx

Mine was stuck at 100% and got to the point where it would die before the indicator got to 90%. One night I left it on the charger for almost 2 hours before going to bed and it died 4 hours later. I got up, put it on the charger, and it did the snake icon to show it was dead then said 100%. I left it on the charger for a couple of hours, got up & put it on. The back was really really warm. I dozed off & woke up 20 minutes later because it felt so warm under my watch - and it was dead. Next day I had a replacement on its way. A couple of weeks with the new one have been great. I leave it a little looser on my wrist to ensure air flow. Here’s hoping we’re good for a while.

Ditto. My Series 5 has started crashing out of nowhere over the last three days at increasing frequency. It'll show a decent charge one minute, and when I look down again a few minutes later, it's gone. It won't turn on again until I place it back on the charger. Once it powers back on, it's showing the same charge. It's done this everywhere between 50 and 95%. I'm getting annoyed. I've only had it three weeks. For the first week, the charge didn't go above 99% no matter if I left it on the charger all night. I just chalked it up to a quirk of the watch. Then it hit 100% and remained there for the longest time before finally inching down. Now it's doing this.

Unpairing hasn't helped. Shutting down background refresh on the apps has done nothing. Hard reboot: also nothing. The software on both the watch and iPhone 11 is up to date. I disabled the always on option a few hours ago when I noticed it wasn't defaulting to the time after 15 seconds. The charge has remained at 99% since then -- not that that means anything, but it hasn't died, yet, either.

I had the same problem back in early November. At first my Watch started shutting down with no warning between 25% and 35%, just every single time it dropped into that range. One time, it even shut down at a few minutes into a swimming session started with more than 50% battery. In another instance, I went on an 8-hour hike, and my Watch would still showed 100% at the end of the day. Then, after charging the Watch during the drive home, the charge indicator started dropping faster than normal, until the Watch shut down once again around the 30% mark.

In total, I spent about 2 months trying to troubleshoot this, first at the Apple Store, then with Tim Cook’s Executive Office, Senior Engineers, etc. During those 2 months, I sent the Watch back to the Apple Store 3 times, who could never reproduce it, and spent upwards of 15 hours on the phone and in chat with Apple. Setting up my Watch as new (multiple times) did nothing.

The phone calls I had with Apple were, as they always are with Apple, completely unproductive, with no one having the slightest idea what could be causing the issue. They also (repeatedly) refused to send me a replacement Watch, and dismissed the idea out of hand that it might be a battery-calibration issue (“I don’t see how that could be the issue here”—Seriously?).

At one point, the engineer I was working with looked at my Battery panel in Settings (via Screen Sharing) and saw that I used Safari a lot (on my iPhone). He concluded that my high Safari usage (again, on my iPhone) was causing my Watch to shut down, and that I should stop using Safari so much. Unreal.

Once I managed to convince him that he was looking at my iPhone usage, he tried to blame it on Watch apps I’d been using forever, for inane reasons, like not having received an update in a month. While he was ultimately wrong (of course), it did give me an idea. It seemed the random shutdowns started happening around the same time I installed the Apple Research App in late October (for the hearing study).

So on my final wipe-and-setup-as-new attempt, I reinstalled all my third-party apps EXCEPT the Apple Research App. That’s when my Watch stopped shutting down randomly.

I can’t imagine how this app could be the only reason so many people have been experiencing this issue (I can’t imagine so many people using it in the first place), but my Series 5 has now been working flawlessly for more than 7 months.

Yes, I'm just giving my personal experience that I haven't had to turn it off and leave it off, even after it started to act up again. It stayed at 100% for a couple hours so I turned it off and immediately put it on the charger and the battery level went down when it turned back on.

My 2 years old Apple Watch Series 2 last much longer than my 10 months Series 5. Unbelievable.

Thanks for the info. Will I have to re-install the OS7 once I reset? Will it reset back to the OS that was on the watch when I bought it?

No it won't. But you really shouldn't have to restore it. Turning it off all the way and leaving it alone for an hour should hopefully be all you need to do!

I've had this for weeks and tried everything, but this finally fixed it. Thank you so much for passing that along.

Read through the posts- what has seemed to work for most people is turning off your watch completely and letting it sit for an hour or so.