watchOS 7 Battery Drain

I think I may have found a fix or at least a temporal fix. Please unpair and repair using your iphone watch app, you may select a backup when repairing. I tried doing it and I think it is not as good as before, but I get me trough my day with enough battery to get home at night.

Same here. Series 4; not cellular. I used to be able to play a round of golf using GolfShot and still have around 55% by the time I got home. I’m prompted for power reserve a little more than halfway through the round.

I saw that all apps were set for background refresh, I thought I turned most all of them on. Luckily, I can try again tomorrow.

Unpairing and re-pairing from the backup seems to have fixed my issue. Last 3 days watch was dead by this time of day. At 47% as of right now, and used it hiking etc today. All background app refreshing is still on, hand washing timer is off.

You can fix this yourself. Although the problem should not be there in the first place.

For some unpairing and pairing again has worked. I suggest that and then afterwards turn the turn the power off first on the IPhone and then on the Watch. Wait 5 minutes then switch on the iPhone. When it has fully loaded switch on the Watch. My watch is absolutely fine after this. If anything the battery seemed to last longer yesterday than it used to for a normal day including having the hand washing reminder running although I don’t have the 20 second watch timer running.

If the fix hasn’t worked for you-

it might sound dumb, like when someone says ‘have you tried switching it off an on again’ , but be sure you are actually unpairing the watch from the iphone rather than just turning off it’s connection to the phone and reconnecting again. If you don’t have to frame the phone camera over the swirly galaxy thing on the watch face then you haven’t unpaired it.

If you did that and restored from your latest back-up rather than set up as a new watch and it still doesn’t make a difference to the battery you might need to try setting it up as a new watch.

i think if that still doesn’t work at least you’d have the back-ups there

Exact same problem as mentioned above with my series 5. Battery dying at an alarming rate. Usually left with about 25-30% of my battery left at end of day, even on the most active days. After updating to WatchOS 7, I am left with about 6%, or else it dies and I have to charge before end of day. Huge problem — please fix!

This solution worked for my iPhone11 pro/Watch5(no cell)/Watch3(cell). I have two watches. The drain on Watch5 was horrible. The drain on Watch3 was not as much.

After updating the iPhone to iOS14, as with ANY Apple update, you must power down then up. Apple updates never seem to work right until after the power cycle anyway. I forgot to do this initially.

Unpair Watch5 and re-pair. I started with 76% battery and ended with 50% battery so putting on a charger might be wise. I didn’t. You won’t lose any data or exercise metrics. Make sure you have a recent backup. I have automatic backups so I had a recent backup.

After monitoring it for 2 days it appears the battery on Watch5 is back to normal. I have handwashing and animated emojis on also.

I was going to unpair/re-pair Watch3 BUT the battery on that seems back to normal after the above steps.

Conclusion: I do not know if it was the power cycles or the pair/re-pair or both that fixed the problem. I suspect the problem may be in iPhone since the Watch3 battery seems back to normal without unpair/re-pairing after I did the Watch5.

AW5 2 months old, battery condition 100% and AW4 21 months old, battery condition 90%. After the update to WOS7, the battery on both watches quickly discharged.
In my case, it helped turn off the optimized charge on both watches and recharge the watch. At the same time, I turned off hand washing.
The consumption of the watch is similar to the state before the update.

Seems as this is not only limited to the update of the watch OS 7

I Have the same problem with the old os on a relatives watch, not fully as bad as on my updated watch thou but after 30minutes of outdoor running her watch went from 95% to below 10.. ad her watch does not on run the latest watch os

So it might be a bug introduced earlier and inherited to the new OS where it got even worse.

with the new OS I had 50% battery after 4 hours use without any training or gps use.

As others mentioned, unpair/pair the watch as new device seems to solve the issue. I am still evaluating, but it looks ok after half a day use after re-pairing

Same here with my series 5, after a 30 min morning run the battery is at 60%.. this is crazy my watch before the last update lasted all day now I need to charge it twice a day. I disabled hand-washing and background app updates but it seems this is not helping. Apple please fix this ASAP

I’ve been having the same issue and have just followed your suggestion. I will feed back if it works for me tomorrow.

like you said it’s a bit of a pain having to repair as a new device but if it solves the issue than it’s a small price to pay

Same here on Series 4. Not willing to reset it as a new Apple Watch and lose everything I already have on it. Charged all night, started at 7am, only 1 workout for 30min, and it's 2:45pm and I'm at 27% battery after not having touched it otherwise. To someone else's comment about Handwashing Timer, mine is already off and still draining.

Incredible flop on Apple's part, hoping they fix this very soon.

I also just did a few hours ago the unpair - restore from backup and it seems better now after just 2 hours. Have not done a workout yet or turned on handwashing or sleep timer. I will not be using sleep and probably not handwashing either. I have kept the screen display set to always on, on my Series 5 watch. Seems normal right now. Thanks everyone for all the comments and help.

Sometimes it takes a couple of days for the apps to completely update and for the Apple Watch to relearn how you use it to optimize batter conservation. That being said I did unpair/pair the watch and that seems to have given some help and perhaps will get better. I also received this from Apple Support

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210551

Since a few comments reflect support saying there haven’t been enough complaints, I’d suggest we all complete the feedback form to reinforce the need for a software fix.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/