Battery Indicator Incorrect on Series 5 Apple Watch

Same problem on Series 2. I have a post on here about it. After unpair repair it worked better. It went about 4 days with the indicator not working then the indicator started working and has been fine since. I am not installing today’s update until see comments about it in here.

Through somewhat of an accident, I got my battery indicator working normally again. After the nth time the device went dead, I left it overnight. No charging. The next day, I charged it until it hit 100% (which took about an hour) and used it for an hour or so. Then I added an exercise I hadn't been able to track with the watch, using my iPhone. I took two+ hours for the watch to pick up on that added exercise, but from the moment it did, the battery indicator has been working normally again (two days and counting). At the end of the day I still have somewhere around 50-60% left. Which I find suspiciously high, since I use it quite intensively.

The only thing that has worked semi-consistently for me when this inevitably happens again is to turn the watch off, leave it off for 30 minutes to an hour, then turn it back on. That seems to reset the battery display for some reason. Hoping for an actual fix ASAP - crazy that this is still an issue after so many months.

Finally a suggestion that seemed to work. I have had the watch cure itself of the stay on 100% most all day and return to normal operation for a week or so and then go back to the same problem. But I tried as suggested by Ashcon, tuning the watch off for an hour or so and turning it back on and Its been operating normally now for 4 days or so. Easy fix to try.

I got it fixed by mistake after all the steps from google failed.

Basically I stopped iphone-watch sync when my iphone restore failed and I restarted my watch.

After the restore i had iphone on ios 13 and the watch on ios 7 beta and the battery indicator worked fine.

after updating the iphone to ios 14 beta and pairing the watch anew the problem did not appear again

I just followed the suggestion from someone on the forum to just turn the watch completely off for a half hour and turn it back on. My series 5 has been fine for over a month now after trying several other suggestions that didn't work.

I just turn it off before I put it on my charger every time now. I don't even wait the 30 minutes anymore. I had it fixed and then I didn't turn it off before I charged it a couple days in a row and it started doing it again. I turned it off and put it back on the charger and it fixed it again. Hopefully this will work for you!

yesterday's watch update so far has fixed the issue. Ran my watch through the night without the normal fail. It's been 24 hours since my last charge.

I can also confirm the watchOS 7 beta seems to fix the issue.

My watch had this problem for a couple of months, and none of the workarounds really worked for me. What did work was downloading the beta os 7.

I'm the guy with the beta iOS 11 Pro Max and Series 5 WatchOS beta. Because I have been making my monthly Apple Care payments of $3.99, my tech offered an express replacement for $69. I jumped at it. The watch arrived next day via Federal Distress so I could not have been happier. HOWEVER, in preparation for receiving a replacement, I decided to ditch the beta OS on my 11 Pro Max and instead did a full erase and new setup from scratch on my iPhone. Wouldn't you know it, between doing that and doing the same on my "problematic" series 5 watch, the watch battery started tracking "normally" again. Oops! So, in my case, at least, the issue was with one of the OS's- not with hardware. Of course, I think there are more "issues" now with some of the applications on the standard OS with regards to my iPhone, such as the badges not updating on Outlook, whether I use the standard Outlook for iOS or the beta. The pay off, however, besides the battery working on my watch as expected is that the Orbit application I have for my "glasses finder" now works so I can at least have some help locating them. The other payoff is just not having all of those silly apps running on my phone, though I am slowly putting back many of them. I hope this helps out some of you as I know this was a bothersome issue. I use the phone to track activity during the day and sleep at night, so I am constantly checking battery and figuring out a "still" time when I am awake when I can charge the phone. I sit at the computer for long stretches so that helps in this regard though is damaging in almost every other regard (It's the "new" smoking). I'm keeping an eye on this post so I'll try to respond if you have questions.

Same issue here. I bought a Series 5 shortly after release last September and the battery never has seemed to behave correctly (won't charge beyond 99%, stays stuck there for hours and dies randomly, etc.) I tried un-pairing it and factory resetting it both from a backup and as new. I finally sent it to Apple in November, only to have them send it back saying they "couldn't replicate the issue"...as many others here have experienced. I wasn't finding many people reporting the same issue back then...now it looks like it's become pretty prevalent. It's disheartening hearing some are still seeing the issue even on their replacements. I've resorted to just charging it regularly and letting it only get up to about 95% so it doesn't get stuck at 99%. It does seem like a software issue, because the techs were baffled when the battery diagnostics came back looking good. Fingers crossed with watchOS 7 I guess...but none of the minor OS 6 updates have done anything to help.

Both mine and my wife's Apple Watches started exhibiting this behavior within the past few days. Both are Apple Watch 4's. Hers the 40mm GPS Only and mine the 44mm GPS+Cellular Stainless.

Perhaps these are of importance? Maybe not:

I handle charging the watches every morning. Whenever possible I never charge any LiIon device to 100% in an effort to extend battery life. Every morning I charge both watches to 80% and the next morning they would normally show 30% to 40% so there was no problem going 24 hours with this charging regime.

So as a test I charged both devices for several hours which meant charging long after the charge level indicated 100%.

Now they exhibit the 100% charge level for a long time before the charge indicator begins to decrease. This will continue until the battery indicator shows 40% to 60% and then the devices just shut off. The only way to wake them is to put them on a charger. No button bushes will wake either watch. To me this means the watch battery is really flat out dead.

But is is?

What if in the mind of the Apple Watche the entire battery level is shifted by 40%? So if the battery is indicating a charge to 100% and immediately removed from the charger but really only at 60% or a difference of 40%? If you leave it on the charger beyond the 100% lever for an hour or so the battery continues to charge but the indicator can only go to 100%. The battery charging logic and indicator are out of sync. So now after extended charging the battery is truly 100% charged but the Watch thinks it's at 140% due so it's charging logic error. So now when the watch is removed from the charger the watch must deplete the physical battery buy 40% before the indicator starts decrementing. So now physical battery is at 60% the logical (software) indicator is at 100%. The watch continues to consume battery and when the physical battery is near 0% the indicator says 40% due to the above out of sync between the physical and logical (software) battery levels. When the battery indicator nears 40% it's really near 0% physical. The software won't trigger the low battery logic because it still thinks (erroneously) the battery is at 40% when it's almost at 0%.

The question to me is how to "resync" the physical and logical battery levels. Resets, repairing, hard restarts don't seem to do it at least for me. Does any of this make sense? I'm not excluding this being self inflicted by not charging to 100% every night but it took about 2 years for this to happen so I'm leaning towards a software issue perhaps due to a Apply Watch update.

How do you know? Apple gave me a new watch (free, in the warranty period) when the first one started having these problems. They said nothing about hardware or software.

And what workaround exactly are you referring to? There are a couple of very complicated workarounds being suggested that do not work, and a simple one (turn the watch OFF before you place it on the charger and let it charge untill it is completely charged) that DOES work.

I did this before returning the second apple watch, which showed the same problems as the first. The problemems have disappeared thanks to this solution, so I did not have to return the second watch.