watchOS 7 Battery Drain

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.

Had the same problem on a series 5. Only thing that worked was unpairing and re-pairing as a new watch (not restore from backup - that didn’t work). A little bit of a pain to setup again from scratch, but battery life was more important to me. In fact, it seems that battery life has improved.

I was having major problems with series 4 watch battery after the 7.0 upgrade. I unpaired and repaired the watch. After repair my watch from the backup, the battery was even worse than before. I was losing a percentage point almost every minute when I had the activity app on. I contacted Apple and ran a diagnostic. They said I need 6 hours of battery history after the repairing. I decided to charge the watch before wearing it. After the recharging, the watch was back to normal. If your repairing doesn’t work, turn off the phone and watch for 5 minutes then turn them on and charge the watch battery. Hopefully, this will solve the problem.

There are many raising the battery issue but there are equally many users contributing here with a solution. I had the battery problem. I tried the unpair/repair route. It did not do it for me. I then, as have already reported, switched off the iPhone completely, then the watch. Then after 5 minutes switched on the iPhone and let it boot up completely. Once done I switched on the watch. No battery problems. It is often advised that after an upgrade a user does this process. In my case it worked and I suspect it will for many others.

I now have an Apple Watch Series 6. I set it up with a backup from a series 4. No problems.

What is wrong is that Apple are not advising users to reboot their devices after an update and the order in which they do it. Customer relations are not their strong point.

Hello all.... I find a solution that maybe could be usefull.... I started at 6:30am and now is 2:00pm and have 73% battery in my apple watch 5.

I get in the phone and unactivate

settings (watch)->wifi-> scroll all the way down and set hotspot to NEVER.

regards

Whilst there is a problem it is strange that the preferred solutions work for some and not all and yet we are all using similar devices. The simplest solution which worked for me was to power off the phone, then the watch, wait a few minutes, then power on the phone and once booted power on the watch. This is what I normally do after an update but this time round I didn’t and initially had the flat battery problem. After I did it, no problems, although I also unpaired and paired again as I wanted to ensure I had an updated backup of the watch.

Others report having done it but still have a problem. Some say messing about with the Handwashing app or other apps helps. I have not needed to do any of that and all are running and monitoring my day. No issues. I am on about 40% at the end of the day.

Why some still report a problem when they have the same devices that others have and who don’t suffer, I don’t know. Usually when that is seen it is user error. But can that be the case here? We have the same software and hardware and therefore why the difference in experiences?

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.......

The huge rapid battery drain was fixed for my AW4 with the Unpair/Pair from backup procedure but I still had a problem unlocking my Macs with my AW4 despite following Gerhardt Leeb's procedure. I installed WatchOS 7.0.2 and the good news is the severe battery drain does not seem to have returned although I only have about 30 minutes experience so far.

Unfortunately, I still cannot unlock my Mac Pro (Late 2013) running macOS 10.5.7 with my AW4 running WatchOS 7.0.2. In the Security & Privacy preference pane on my Mac I get the spinning "wheel" for quite awhile which ends with the message "Your Mac was unable to communicate with your Apple Watch. Make sure your Apple Watch is unlocked and on wrist, and your iPhone is unlocked." However, the good news is that I am now able to unlock my Mac mini (2014) running the latest beta of Big Sur macOS 11.0 with my AW4. Perhaps, the problem is with macOS 10.15.7 since it worked fine under 10.15.6 and earlier rather than WatchOS 7.0/7.0.1/7.0.2. In any case, I'm going to wait for the final release of Big Sur before doing anything else.

I have not had battery issues recur with the latest update. Interestingly, my 4 never got more than ten hours without needing to be recharged from the day I bought it 19 months ago. I went through the battery drain issue with the last big update, did the unpaired/repair from factory settings and the battery life has been really good for the first time since I got the watch. Go figure.

Except it happened with my new series 6.

I had a series 4 when IOS 7 arrived. Battery drain was massive until I sorted it. My series 6 arrived and battery drain was high, but not as high as with the series 4, and thus I am not convinced that was hardware related. It came right after powering off the devices and then powering on again.

There is another issue IOS 7 produced. A drop in the sensitivity of the heart rate sensor such that when swimming it does not always get a reading. Again a software issue for I experienced it with my series 4 after IOS 7 and now with my series 6.

I was having the exact same issue. I contacted Apple and they had me un-pair and re-pair my watch. Now the battery is back to normal!

I’ve heard that it’s the washing hand feature, I would turn that off and wait for Apple to fix it.

For me it helped to disconnect the watch from Iphone and reconnect it. Now battery lasts as usual. I am on a Watch 4.

i was having same issue. Perform an un-pair and re-pair of the Apple Watch to your iPhone. This fixed the issue for me.

Unpair your watch then re-pair it with your iPhone. Solved the problem for me. Back to 100% after 2 hours of use