Apple Watch 6 battery draining in Watch OS 7.6.2

My issue seems to have worked itself out. I did two things.

1. I left it alone for days. Battery was dying so fast it was of no use to me on my wrist. I charged it and forgot about it for 2 days. Maybe it was updating something but I have my doubts. It had over a week to sort out any maintenance it needed to do after the updates.

2. I changed one setting. Under FaceID and settings I made sure that Unlock with Apple Watch was ON. It used to be on but appears to have flipped off during the updates. I checked this setting because of all of the issues I am hearing about this and the new iPhone. While my iPhone is currently not new I figured it’s worth checking. Strangely it was off.

it is now 11 hours later and my watch still has 54% charge.

Update: Re-pairing the watch definitely improved my battery life. I will say I have not tested it yet under heavy exercise, but there is an improvement. Since I did a total reset, I also paired down a few of the apps I installed to the watch, removing a few unnecessary one. So whether it was the act of resetting the watch with a fresh install of WatchOS 8 or eliminating some power hungry app, this did work for me.

As I wrote I had an improvement by unpairing the watch and configuring it as new, and the function I did not activate was the unlock with apple watch. So don’t think it makes any difference, but I still can activate it and see if it improves further

I unpaired and erased all content on my watch - after doing this numerous times, it seems the battery life is much better.

Try to initialize the watch with complete erasing of data and re-start as new watch, you can fix the issue

I have to say that after iOS 15 and watchOS 8 nothing changed. Then I unpaired the watch and re-paired as a new watch, and its battery life improved, but nothing compared to before watchOS 7.5

I've tried all the tricks listed here but eventually only one seems to work for me: after a 100% recharge I switched my new iWatchSE 2°gen off for 15 minutes. Now the battery drain is quite similar to before the 7.6.1 update.

Having exhausted every suggestion here I enabled the power saving mode within the workout app and it seems to have made a massive improvement to the watch. I suspect battery drain issues are being caused by the heart rate.

That sucks. Did you try the backup, reset, restore? (In conjunction with the latest update) I didn’t have to do this to get my battery usage back, but my uses are likely different than others.

For what it's worth, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, I too was having the battery drain issue immediately after upgrading to 7.6.2. However, doing a full reset seems to have fixed it.

That said, I'm in no hurry to upgrade to 8.0. I have no doubt there's some regressions in 8.0 and I'll let the earlier adopters work those out.

Unpairing and repairing as a “new” watch worked for me aswell, but only improved the disaster it was before. Today I switched on the watch at 8 AM with 100% and now (10:30 PM) is 2%. I didn’t use it, I just read some notifications during the day 🤬

Yes indeed the issue is the battery. It will cost you approximately $95 to get it replaced. I just shipped mine to Apple will let you know what happens when I get my watch back.

Something is going on with this update. I have two Series 3 watches (the GPS and Cellular). Both watches are at 100% battery health and both have the OS 7.6.1 update and the GPS watch will die after 8 hours of use. Before the update I could get two days out of the GPS watch before it needed to be charge up. I’ll wear the GPS watch to work and don’t use anything on the watch while I’m working and the battery will still drain. The Cellular one will hold a 4 day charge before it’ll go dead. I tried to tell the idiots at Apple about this update but they told me not to compare the two watches, even though the only difference is one you can make calls on without the phone and the other one you need a phone.

I had a phone call with an “advanced” tech and he confirmed me that 99% of the battery drain issues are coming from the software, and can affect also the iPhone (this is my case, battery health dropped to 88 and 90, from 96, on both), since the constantly talk togheter. I had another contact later, as they opened a ticket, and they remotely took control of my iPhone, but just to check settings. They are “monitoring” the situation but honestly don’t know if it’s really usefull or not.

I did the upgrade to iOS 8 and did improve the issue. It is not draining as fast. I did not do a full reset since the upgrade. I will try that again since the draining is still happening just not as fast as it was.