Battery Drain since watchos 7.4

Update.. went to apple store.. diagnostic done.. no issue.. nothing they can do unless i want to send it in and let them tell me i have to pay an out of warranty repair costing $389 CAD which is basically 65% of a new watch. Out of luck until next update and see if that will help

Hello, I had the same problem on an apple watch SE and despite all the solutions found on differents forums, nothing worked. 

After deactivating the WiFi on the apple watch, the battery life is returned as before the update. 


Regards

When you say deactivate wifi, you mean put on airplane mode? In Airplane mode i'm still getting my updates from the phone via BT so I guess that's turning off wifi. I started to try that this morning. Hoping that might help. If you have another option to disable wifi only, please share the steps

Will keep you all posted with airplane mode.

I was having this problem last week. Drain was significant. Was going from 100% to less than 50% battery life in less than 2 hrs.

I did a bunch of things recommended on this thread, but things turned around a good bit after Apple did a remote diagnostic, which followed my powering down the watch for about 30 minutes; updating all the apps; turning off automatic downloads; turning off most "background app refresh".

I'm not sure which step did the trick, but I'm back to about 95% of what I had going before. It's been 2 hrs since I put on the watch today, and I'm only "down" to 88%. Extrapolating that out, I should have 14-16 hrs battery life today.

HI All

I want to share and thank Fernando_Roque for his suggestion as that resolved my issue. I disabled the Wifi and it does indeed return to normal for me. I turned it back on and used my second IOT network (which has an apple router) and it still seems to stay normal. However if i go to my home network using a cisco commerical router, I see the drain 5% in 10 mins.. I am sure this is the root cause. I am happy to just turn off Wifi and rely on BT or use the IOT network for now and try again in the next release!

Thanks all for your inputs and hopes everyone finds a fix!

So this is interesting - if the wifi is causing issues, and especially if it happens on one wifi network and not another one - then it may help to "forget" the wifi network and then reconnect. It's possible that the wifi connection information has become corrupted, and the watch is constantly trying to connect, failing, then trying again and again and again, etc. "Forgetting" the network and reconnecting will reset that network connection.

To forget the network on your watch, go into settings and (while connected to the problem network) tap the network name, then tap forget. For good measure, do that on your phone too - go into the phone settings, wifi and tap the "info" "i" icon next to the network name, then tap "forget this network" .

Then - on your phone - tap that network to re-connect, re-enter your wifi password,, and see if the problem goes away.

Looks like disabling WiFi also disables the ability of the watch to unlock your phone with a mask. So I guess you could just disable that feature. I suppose that make sense, that was the biggest new feature of this round of updates.

I’m having the same issue with my Series 6. I’ve reset, unpaired and re-paired, follow steps in troubleshooting docs, nothing has helped. I go from 100% to 0 in 6-10 hours and often the most usage is when I’m sitting at my desk not using the watch at all. I’ve contacted Apple support multiple times and they say everything is normal. This all started with the update to 7.4 and there was no improvement with 7.4.1.

I am also encountering the same issue with my series 4 watch. I think it started after the last update. Battery would last all day prior to that, would still have about 40% at bedtime. Now by 5-6 PM it is already on reserve. I hope they fix this with another software update.

My apple watch series 4 cellular was normally keeping its charge to almost 45 hours. And i used to charge it every 2 days almost but its been almost a week that the battery drains in less than a day. Its either apple is trying to trick us to buy a newer watch or the newest watch os is having a bug

I had the exact issue on my Series 5 44mm after updating to 7.4.1. I tried unpairing it and re-paring it via the Watch app on my iPhone a couple times. The first time I restored the watch from backup. Since that didn't help, the second time I set it up as a new watch. I kept things super minimal and only installed 6 apps, but it didn't make a difference.

I finally fixed it by doing a Reset on the watch itself by going to Settings -> General -> Reset -> Erase all Content and Settings. After the watch reset, I paired it again and restored from backup. Now my watch is back to having around 60% charge remaining after a full day. In other words, I had to Reset/Erase the watch from the watch itself since unpairing from the Watch app on my iPhone did not help.

This is the best yet.

Stay with me....might be a little long. My series 4 started the battery drain issue the third week in March. Right after that update. All the updates since (and there have been SEVERAL of them) have not corrected the issue. I did everything suggested here on the forum . EVERYTHING. I finally called apple support. I spoke with a very nice tech who went through everything with me and he determined that I was due a replacement since my apple care + covered my issues. A replacement was sent out and in two days I had another series 4 watch which I set up as a brand new watch. For 4 days it was as good as my first experience with the previous watch. I would go to bed each night at about 10 after having it on for about 15 hours and I would be at 47 -49 % left on the battery. Today.....day 5 .....replacement watch.......12 hours ....25% and dropping a percent every few minutes. Something just isn't right.

Yes suddenly during the day the battery is running out of juice

I have never experience this before with my Apple Watch 3 you should think tha a new watch is a improvement

i adjust the screen to always of and stil he is bugging me with the drain experience

Mine does the same. I updated it to 7.5 and now my battery won’t last half the day. I wish they would send a new update to fix this. I have in-paired it and rebooted it started it as a new watch everything I’m just eating for an update to fox it now. I enjoy it for 4-5 hours and that’s it my battery is good it says 88%

I have told all of my other Apple Watch users to not do the update because you will be very disappointed with it.

wish the would be fixed fast I sure do love my watch.

I went through every troubleshooting process imaginable. I talked to tech support multiple times, they installed a special battery logging utility then sent the results to the engineering team and eventually sent the watch (Series 6) to Apple for analysis. They returned it and said everything was fine - it was not. It got so bad I was going from 100% to 20% or less in 2-4 hours. They finally replaced it with a brand new one and it started to do the same thing - not quite as bad but it went from 100% to 45% in the 6 hours I was sleeping. I didn't know what else to do so I started looking at the files it had logged using the utility and a bunch of them were named "podcast..." I thought that was strange because I don't use my watch for podcasts at all. I checked the settings for podcasts and it was set to "mirror iPhone" but I didn't have any episodes downloaded and all the shows in the list were unchecked to sync. So I changed the settings for the Podcast app, Music app, and Audiobooks app (none of which I've ever used on the watch nor had anything downloaded but I wanted to change every app in the "content" category) - all from "mirror my iPhone" to "Custom" and made sure notifications were off and no shows or anything else was selected. I have no idea why but that completely fixed the issue. I now am back to a solid 24 hours of battery life. If you're having issues it's worth a try. To be clear- when all these apps were set to "mirror my iPhone" none of these apps were downloading anything nor were any of the shows, albums, etc. selected. I never used any of these apps on my watch. Even though the net effect is the same - none of these apps were syncing anything nor downloading content - changing the setting to "custom" seemed to make all the difference.