watchOS 7 Battery Drain

I had the same issue. But was able to solve it. This involves unpairing and erasing your watch. No issues so far after that. Been using for more than 48 hours now. No anomalies.

• Unpair and reset your apple watch.
• Connect to your phone and follow the connection process.
• Charge your watch to 100%.

Continue using and observe the battery usage. Should most likely solve the issue.

The unpair/pair solution helped for me as well for the battery drain problem. The „unlock“ problem was solved for me using these steps:

Steps (follow at your own discretion)

1. Open "Keychain Access"
2. In "View", enable "Show Invisible Items"
3. Search for "Auto Unlock"
4. You should see a whole bunch of application passwords for "Auto Unlock: XXXX's ..."
5. Select all records and delete (this will reset/disable auto unlock on other Macs if you use multiple Macs)
6. Whilst still in "Keychain Access", search for "AutoUnlock" (no space)
7. There should be 4 entries for "tlk" "tlk-nonsync" "classA" "classC"
8. Select 4 records and delete (don't worry if they re-appear, the system repairs this automatically)
9. Open "Finder" and navigate to "~/Library/Sharing/AutoUnlock"
10. There should be two files "ltk.plist" and "pairing-records.plist"
11. Delete both files
12. Open "System Preferences" and try enabling auto unlock. You may need to enable it twice, the first attempt will fail.

How to unpair your Apple Watch from your iPhone

1. Keep your Apple Watch and iPhone close together as you unpair them.
2. Open the Watch app on your iPhone.
3. Go to the My Watch tab and tap All Watches (Upper left corner).
4. Tap the info button next to the watch that you want to unpair.
5. Tap Unpair Apple Watch
6. Now pair the watch. Okay to use backup or setup as new.

So I think I’m zeroing in on something here:

Apple just had a service outage that lasted for a bit. During that time my battery drain was significantly SLOWER than when it was restored. Now that my battery is draining super fast and I did the whole:

• unpair
• set up as new
• power off phone
• power off watch
• power both back up

When I look at Battery on my watch, you can see the slope of the power drain changed during the outage and started to drop off again. I think this is tied to some apple services.

Other things to turn off:

1. Disable pod cast syncing. I do a lot of podcasts, my watch was killing itself trying to syncing things I never listen to from my watch directly.
2. Turn off Music syncing, same thing

My problems aren’t gone but these things did help me a bit before.

Sorry, it was Gerhard Leeb who provided these steps that worked for him and one other poster:

The unpair/pair solution helped for me as well for the battery drain problem. The „unlock“ problem was solved for me using these steps:

Steps (follow at your own discretion)

1. Open "Keychain Access"
2. In "View", enable "Show Invisible Items"
3. Search for "Auto Unlock"
4. You should see a whole bunch of application passwords for "Auto Unlock: XXXX's ..."
5. Select all records and delete (this will reset/disable auto unlock on other Macs if you use multiple Macs)
6. Whilst still in "Keychain Access", search for "AutoUnlock" (no space)
7. There should be 4 entries for "tlk" "tlk-nonsync" "classA" "classC"
8. Select 4 records and delete (don't worry if they re-appear, the system repairs this automatically)
9. Open "Finder" and navigate to "~/Library/Sharing/AutoUnlock"
10. There should be two files "ltk.plist" and "pairing-records.plist"
11. Delete both files
12. Open "System Preferences" and try enabling auto unlock. You may need to enable it twice, the first attempt will fail.

There is a cure for this which has worked for me and others and it was posted in this forum. I claim no ownership of it and it is replicated below and thank the originator for it. You may find that rebooting your iMac is needed after you have done this.

Apple Watch - Computer Unlock

1. Open "Keychain Access"
2. In "View", enable "Show Invisible Items"
3. Search for "Auto Unlock"
4. You should see a whole bunch of application passwords for "Auto Unlock: XXXX's ..."
5. Select all records and delete (this will reset/disable auto unlock on other Macs if you use multiple Macs)
6. Whilst still in "Keychain Access", search for "AutoUnlock" (no space)
7. There should be 4 entries for "tlk" "tlk-nonsync" "classA" "classC"
8. Select 4 records and delete (don't worry if they re-appear, the system repairs this automatically)
9. Open "Finder" and navigate to "~/Library/Sharing/AutoUnlock"
10. There should be two files "ltk.plist" and "pairing-records.plist"
11. Delete both files
12. Open "System Preferences" and try enabling auto unlock. You may need to enable it twice, the first attempt will fail.

Another update:

Started my day at 5:15 AM with my Series 6. Spent much of my day working, just finished a 30 min walk at 2:58 PM, watch is down to 16%. I have three Diagnostic Logs on the watch app on my phone:

• rtcreportingd_2020-11-26...
• remindd.cpu_resource-2020-11-26...
• stacks+apsd-2020-11-26...

Does Apple read those? Should I send them to them?

After the watchOS update, my watch (S4 Cellular with iPhone 11) also drains the battery very fast. Usually it could hold up to 1,5 days. Now it’s draining from 100 to 10 in 4 hours, when working out even faster!

Apple support said I should set up an exchange at the store..

Can someone confirm, that unpairing and repairing again solves the issue?

Update:

Good new - I unpaired and re-paired the watch from my most recent backup and the battery issue seems to have been fixed.

Bad News - I cannot get the watch to unlock my Mac any more. Have tried multiple times to fix but with the following error message, despite Watch, iPhone and Mac all switched on, logged in and on the same WiFi network. Have switched all off and back on etc. Still an issue.

Hi Gerhard

Quite crazy i don't see the folder on my laptop finder but i was able to reach it. and see the same hierarchy as you....by search and find and delete those files ..i've delete the two files.. Alleluia..Don't understand why i dont see those file .in french OS .but with search and find it works quite a mess Thanks for your help..

Not to foul everyone on this thread this was the solution to get my mac unlock with my watch..the battery problem solve with unpair pair solution 🙃

The unpair and restore from backup trick works! Here’s my experience.

I also had the same terrible battery drain issue. I have an Apple Watch series 5. I upgraded to watchOS 7 on Wednesday the 16th.

I noticed immediately the next day because my watch had drained its power to 10% after I had been wearing it for about eight hours. Typically I could wear my watch for 16 hours and still have over 30% battery life with normal usage.

My first suspicion was the handwashing timer. So I turned that off and also turned off the always on screen feature. I also power cycled the watch.

Neither one of those things helped. The battery drain was still intense. This morning the battery drained from 100% to 79% in an hour and a half with only 6 minutes of active usage.

So, I did what several people have recommended – I unpaired my Apple Watch from my phone - selecting “keep cellular number”. Then I paired it with my phone again and restored it up from the back back up. This process took about 30 minutes and drained another 10% battery.

I put the watch back on its charger and after it charged back to 100% put it back on my wrist and have been wearing it all day much more satisfied. Here are some screenshots of my usage and battery health from both the watch and the phone.

I grab these every day when my watch hits 10%. 6hrs of usage would indicate I’m listening to audio, workout or something, but I don’t. And you can see it’s only native apps installed, there’s definitely a WatchOS issue

I have upgraded my AW 4 Nike 44 mm to watchOS 7.1 beta 2.

In the first hour it looked OK, and afterwards continued to drain the battery with near to 15% per hour.

I haven't try to reset my iPhone (iPhone 8 iOS 14.0.1) together with the watch. I tried few times watch reset, turn off watch and phone for 5 min, turn on flight mode, and nothing impact the battery drain speed.

The battery health is 91%.

This morning the result is 12 min usage 1:56 hour standby, battery 77%.

Just to update on my previous post above, I checked my S4 and indeed “walkie talkie” was “on” (Orange symbol lit when swiped up) so I turned it off. I let the watch do its thing for the rest of the day and finally took it of before going to bed......it still had 11% battery left and the usage stats showed as below:

Left it charge on its dock overnight, put it on this morning around 11am and just checked the usage stats again which showed 4hr 9 min standby and 31m usage and the battery has only dropped to 94%

Result? - not sure if rebooting both devices helped, or if turning of the walkie talkie was the culprit....seems as if battery is draining correctly as far as I know.......