I have an apple watch 5. After upgrading to watchOS 9, I am facing a serious battery drain, where a full recharge is not enough for 12h without workout and 1h with a workout? is that a OS issue? or my watchOS battery is not in a good shape? Before the upgrade I was recharging every 24h
Apple Watch Series 5
Hi here, I have been encountering the exact same problem for 2 weeks but have finally found a way that stops the battery drain for me.
I'm using Apple Watch Ultra but started encountering a serious battery drain issue starting from last week, battery evaporates at a 10% hourly rate on idle state even when my low power mode is on. Some solutions would suggest repairing or factory reset, but none of those actually worked for me. I had to use my AppleCare for an exchange, but the second watch suffers from the same nightmare.
After reading: apple.com/uk/batteries/maximizing-performance/
Disabling Bluetooth on your iPhone increases the battery drain on your Apple Watch. For more power-efficient communication between the devices, keep Bluetooth enabled on iPhone.
I noticed that as long as I keep the bluetooth of my iPhone on, the battery situation will be normal. (now at ~1% per hour instead of 10%)
Personally I feel that there is a problem with WatchOS 9.1 when dealing with the no-bluetooth situation, but I'd suggest to give this a try if you are suffering from the same issue & also have a habit to keep the iPhone bluetooth disabled.
Hope this helps somebody.
Thanks @coveyite. I’ve got the series 4 with cellular and have had the problem since 9.2 rolled out. Unpaired/re-paired, rebooted, shut off cellular, deleted apps, changed faces, prayed to Krampus, you name it. Nothing gets me back to my all-day life I enjoyed two weeks ago. 🤷🏻♂️
Figure I’ve just got to wait for an engineer to find the runaway process and stomp the bug in 9.3.
Question - does anyone else have multiple SSIDs broadcast from their router? I have noticed in the past 2-3 days that my Apple Watch keeps switching to a different SSID than the one that my phone is on. I'm not sure if this is related to the battery drain, but I verified today that at 6:30 AM my watch was 100% and at 8:00 AM it is 83%. This is a brand new Series 8, so it's not a battery issue. I have switched the watch to the SSID that my phone is connected to and will see if that helps, but I wanted to check if anyone had noticed something like this?
I may be grasping at straws but currently, my watch is less than useful!
Thank you! Well. Battery calibration changes could be causing this unusual drop in battery health. I actually did not listen any music / podcasts during this period before/after holidays. I was not concerned about battery health because I knew it's 93%, maybe normal after 2 1/2 years of usage. But when I noticed it was 88%, I started to worry because of 5% lost in like 10 days. I started to monitor daily the battery, seen another 2% percent drop in 2 days. Reading different threads/posts in Apple Community, I also tried the unpair / repair. Not sure if it really helped, but battery health is still 86% in past 2 days. A good sign ?
Maybe new WatchOS 9.2 is testing for some fancy features/battery options available only on new AW 8 / Ultra and it's killing the battery on older AW4/AW5. This is just a theory as well.
After 2 more days, battery health is 83%. From December 14-th (before WatchOS 9.2 update) until Jan 6-th, battery health decreased from 93% to 83%. This is not right. Battery life is still good after repairing AW5 though: it's like 30%-40% (with/without workout) in the evening, when I charge it to 100%, before bed time (I use sleep tracking, airplane mode, notifications off over night). When I wake up battery is 85-90% charged. My concern is that battery health will get under 80% and probably it will require battery replacement, due WatchOS 9.2 update.
I doubt that WatchOS 9.3 update will "restore" the battery health. The battery is aging "forced" by WatchOS 9.2 update and/or recalibration. Am I the only one seeing this: battery drain partially resolved by AW repair and battery health decreasing 1% every 1-2 days ?
Same issue since upgrading to Watch OS 9.1 (and iPhone to 16.4.1). With similar use, starting the day at 100%, I get 20% or less at the end of the day instead of over 50% previously. Battery health is 80%, but it was also 80% a few days ago.
I also had to switch to developer mode to be able to download from Xcode. Could it be a cause of problem ?
I switch to low consumption mode and will see what happens tomorrow… So something has changed.
Battery health is fine APPLE just needs to fix their update to not drain the battery needlessly
That’s not a solution. This is happening to everyone who has updated.
Just got the apple watch ultra 2 weeks back, it used to stay charged for around 2 days with normal usage. After updating to watchos 9.1 it barely complete a day !!
Losing 5-10% per hour on my new Ultimate. I sent it back and received a new one today with the SAME ISSUE. Something is assume with the 9.x Watch OS.
See my previous post about changing watch face 🤗
Yep I’ll give the Chronograph pro a shot. That, and a factory reset. I’ll report back.
What face are you using?
Yeah, my girlfriend has iwatch 6 and i have iwatch ultra and it happen the same!
usually iwatch ultra was lasting 2 days, now a night is draining almost half…
😮 I also had the problem of my watch freezing. I would wake up in the middle of the night and it would be only 00:10 or something. If I went to the loo it would jump to the correct time. This too has been fixed by my face change.
I have a hunch that Apple did it deliberately, to force consumers to buy new Watches, as we have been staying on the old ones for too long. This is because it's made too obvious for their employees to not see it. It happened before with iOS on iPhones and ended up with lawsuits.
"Accidentally", some newer Watch users are impacted too.
I guess Apple will "fix" this bug in new watches in the future. This time they would do it much cleaner, leaving no traces for old model users to sue them.
Let's see what they would write in 9.1.1 release note.
watchOS 9 battery drain
