Apple Watch Series 7 Poor Battery Life after Watch iOS 9

New and encouraging update from me! Sorry for the wall of text, but it looks like this saga may finally be over and I just want to luxuriate in it a little bit.

So the new OS updates did nothing to help, but another Apple product issue led to what may finally be a resolution (still want to wait and see rather than declare immediate victory).

I'd bought an AirTag a year and a half ago to put on our dog, especially in the crate while we travel and he goes in the plane hold. When I got it, I was able to add it to my account, but the Precise Finding and Play a Sound features never worked. I was a little miffed but never really thought about it too hard. I eventually called Apple Support this past summer, but I was a month or so past the 1 year mark and they did a bit of troubleshooting and eventually said that it must need repair but it would cost as much as a new one, so I gave up on it.

At Christmas, friends of ours got us a couple of new AirTags. When I went to set them up, they had the same problem. Could set it up, but not communicate after. This time my fiancé has a new iPhone with the UW chip, so I reset the AirTag (my phone couldn't even connect to remove it from my account so I had to factory reset the AirTag), and it worked fine on her phone.

Finally a new clue. Maybe it's my iPhone that's causing issues? Both AirTags and my Watch aren't working correctly. For that matter my AirPods sometimes have weird issues as well. I had noticed in my experimentation that although Low Power Mode seemed to not stop the battery drain issues, when I switched off Bluetooth, that helped. So I called Apple Support about the AirTag and Watch battery drain and how I suspected that maybe the phone was the problem. They insisted on treating them as separate issues, tackled the Watch first and did all the same steps and couldn't figure it out so they set up another Genius Bar appointment (the Watch drained about 10% in 20 minutes on the call). Onto the AirTag and same failure to find anything wrong. They ran a communications diagnostic on the iPhone and said that it's working as expected. They said one final step was to try a factory reset of the iPhone and to call back if that doesn't work, but I was already preparing to fight tooth and nail at the Apple store to get either a new Watch or new iPhone or SOMETHING so I wouldn't be plagued with these issues anymore.

But guys... it worked! On everything! After doing a factory reset and iCloud backup restore of my phone, the AirTag issue is solved, the Watch battery drain so far appears to be fixed, and other miscellaneous annoyances also seem to be working normally. For instance, I wanted to try the Plus subscription for PocketCasts so I could listen to podcasts on my Watch without having my phone, but my account status wouldn't sync across no matter what I did. Now it does.

Since Tuesday @ 2:30 pm:

• Went from 100% to 77% in 6 hours.
• Did an overnight sleep tracking, 100% to 82% in over 9 hours.
  • Continued on down to 50% in 16.5 hours total.
• Another 100% to 62% in 14.5 hours including an overnight.
• Currently sitting at 77% after I fully charged it this morning over 8.5 hours ago.

So in other words, back to fantastic battery life! I've been feeling so confident that I have already re-installed all of my third party apps. Nothing saying that it can't degrade again, after all I had similarly promising results after doing factory resets on the Watch that then crumbled away over time, but I'm optimistic that maybe this solved a root cause.

For the record, I have an iPhone 12 Mini, and an Apple Watch Series 7. I hope this account helps anyone else suffering from battery drain. Could be caused by something affecting the communication between the Watch and the iPhone. Try to do a factory reset of your phone, for extra credit, maybe try factory reset of both (back up both, factory reset the Watch, then factory reset the iPhone, then boot up and restore the iPhone, then boot up and restore the Watch). Good luck to anyone who finds this thread in the future!

Hey @Bunner33, sorry to hear that.

Have you read the thread and seen my last post where I recommended trying to factory reset the iPhone? It worked for me. The fact that you got a new Watch with the same issue makes me feel like maybe you have the same problem mine had, something about how the iPhone is communicating with the Watch is causing battery drain.

Since my previous update, I’ve noticed that my Watch is actually working so much better overall since I reset my phone. The entire time I’ve owned the Watch, it’s been a little janky when using it to skip forward/back in podcasts, it would jump around a lot, and when I am tracking a workout in Strong on my Watch and synced to the iPhone, adding exercises on the phone wouldn’t really sync or it would be inconsistent at best, I’d have to try to also add a new exercise on the Watch to force it to sync.

Now all of those issues that I took for granted are gone, and the Watch is behaving better than I knew it could after a year of owning it. I’m stunned.

Hopefully you have the same problem and it can be fixed the same way, it’s a bit of a hassle doing a factory reset on the phone but it’s been an incredible result.

After setting up my watch as new, I went running yesterday for 2h 20min. Used GPS, didn't play any music or podcast. I do this most Sundays. This time, it took my watch from 90% to 15%. That's at least twice as much as it normally does.

I noticed two odd things with my watch/phone:

• I synced an Apple Music playlist to the watch. That was stuck at 90% completion for a day. After restarting my watch and my phone, I finally could delete that playlist in the "Music" section of the watch app on my iPhone.
• My iPhone 14 Pro Max went nuts yesterday. It lost at least 30-40% of its battery charge in about 4 hours of being idle (during my run). It got so hot that I noticed it during a phone call. "Health" was listed as taking up 85% of battery over the last 24 hours. Restarting the phone brought it back to normal.

I uninstalled nearly all apps from my watch. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that between that and the stopped music syncing, my watch now has better battery life.

In short: Apple didn't fix it.

I picked up my Apple Watch in the Apple Store yesterday. After my Genius Bar appointment two weeks ago, the Apple Store had sent it to a "Deep Inspection" as they only have limited diagnostics in the store. I was on vacation, so my watch was at the store for a week.

Anyway, the guy in the store said that they actually "fixed the battery". I'm not sure how that would work, as the hardware battery drain only showed after the software update to watchOS 9.1 and neither the hardware nor the software has changed.

Anyhow, I set up my watch from a backup. Last night, it went from about 85% to maybe 15% just monitoring my sleep., And today, it drained 25% in less than 90 minutes. I set it up one more time as a new watch and will measure the battery drain. If it's still bad tomorrow, I'll make another appointment with the Genius Bar.

I haven't given an update in a while, so here goes:

After my last update, I'd called Apple Support again, and this time they made me an appointment in an Apple Store. When I got there, the guy walked through a bunch of troubleshooting steps, and flat out told me that it sounded like a bug in the operating system, and that he wasn't going to send it out because there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the hardware, and it would just get sent back.

He told me that I would just have to sit tight and hope that Apple finds and patches the issue soon, and to try to turn off always-on and other things. While we were sitting there for close to an hour talking about it, the battery dropped from 96% to 71% while on battery saver (which shuts off Always On Display, limits wireless connections, etc). I asked him how I'm supposed to get anything close to the value out of this Watch that I am supposed to after sinking close to a thousand dollars into it. He shrugged and said he wished he could help but all he can do is submit the report to the engineering team.

After this I decided to do a full reset and re-pair of the Watch, since that at least gave me a few weeks of decent battery life last time before it acted up again. This time I kept every single third party app uninstalled when I paired it back up again. It gave me good results (for example using 48% over a 14 hour period, 41% over a 13.5 hour period), proving once again that the hardware is capable of delivering good battery life.

However, after about 9 days, the extreme drain returned. I'd been going back to sleep tracking after the re-pair, but woke up one morning with it at 8% (after being at 100% when going to sleep), and now we're right back to where it was. The battery health has dropped another 2% to 90% (it started September at 98% before this issue started). Maybe one silver lining is that this will destroy my battery so hard before my AppleCare+ is up so they'll be forced to replace the battery or give me a new Watch next year, but I'd rather that it just worked properly in the first place.

@Karsten: I also work in tech and understand the harsh realities of building for scale. The fact I haven't been able to find widespread reports about this is exactly why I'm worried. If there's only a handful of people dealing with this strange battery drain issue, then being told to sit tight and wait for an OS fix sounds like we're going to be waiting for a long, long time.

@LengthyEpic: I had the same experience in the store as you. They ran the checks on the watch, which showed the hardware was fine. The difference was in how they handled the results.

For me, they send the watch for deep inspection the first time around. When it came back with "All fine", they then said they'd switch it for me (of course, after another inspection). I was lucky because I got the same Apple guy in both appointments.

I was at the Genius Bar on Thursday, telling them about the continued battery drain. They agreed to switch my watch for free. I'll get the replacement by next Wednesday. 😃

I work in tech, as well, and have seen the same battery drain. In my experience, when things go sideways and the only thing that changed was the installed OS, that's usually on the critical path to the root cause. Doesn't mean it was the OS update, per se - the OS is meant to support new hardware and backward compatibility to support the old can be problematic. I suspect that in this case, unit testing and UAT was probably expedited, may have been on a digital twin of earlier Watch versions instead of real hardware, etc. so incompatibility issues were not discovered. I am leery of 100% reliance on digital twins for DevOps testing, but I haven't always won that debate.

New watch, old battery drain issues: Still drains as fast as before, roughly twice as much as it should. Ran with the watch for 1h:40min today, which I often do. That took the battery from about 70% to 5%. Needless to say, I only lost about 30-40% of battery before watchOS 9.1.

I don't want to switch watches again. More likely, the bug's in watchOS 9.1. I'm hoping that watchOS 9.2 in mid-December will fix this. Since I'm mostly sitting at my desk throughout the day, I can manage with the increased battery drain. I just have to see how to get through my 2h:15min run - fully charged and with low-power workout mode, hopefully.

I bit the bullet yesterday, unpaired my watch, and set it up as a new one with minimal apps. I'll know if that worked by Tuesday, I guess.

I've been having the same issues. It got so bad that it was draining before my very eyes while on the phone with Apple Support (drained 30% in about 40 minutes). Apple Support did some diagnostics and told me there was nothing wrong with the watch, and to try unpairing and re-pairing but otherwise took zero ownership over the issue. I had to push to even get passed on to someone who would do live diagnostics with me on the phone.

The repairing actually did seem to work for about a month, it felt like it was back to normal. Now in the past couple of days, it's back to being consistently draining. I just looked at it an hour ago and it was at 65%, now it's down to 20%. Unacceptable. I guess I'll have to try unpairing and repairing it again, but what a pain that is (and remains to be seen if it'll work). I wish the Watch reported which apps are draining battery since apparently "there's nothing wrong" with the Watch itself.

To add insult to injury, when the issues started last time, my battery health was at 98% (it was one of the first things I checked), and over the course of a week while I was trying to figure out what was going on, it drained to death overnight from full multiple times and the battery health got knocked down to 92%. I only bought the Watch in January after 10 years with Fitbits. It's left me worrying whether this Watch will actually be usable for even a year. If it dies there's zero chance I will ever buy another, I'm not dropping close to a thousand dollars for something that will be a paperweight within a year.

Hi Karsten

I appreciate your fair minded approach. From my vantage point, it’s not entirely the lack of a fix to the problem. It’s a lack of acknowledgment of the problem. I have seen posts in which apple representatives tell us to turn off our features and functions. Basically, they are blaming the user. We’re just using too many apps. And while there is some truth to that, if you haven’t changed anything, and suddenly your watch goes from lasting 15 hours to 4 hours… Something is wrong with the update.

I also can’t help but wonder what’s the cost to Apple associated with those of us who might go back to their competitor because they’re not acknowledging our problem and not letting us know it’s on the road map?

I’m really not interested in doing business with a company that purposely makes their products obsolete so I have to buy another one. In a world with these economic conditions and potential forecast, it’s not a wise business move to do that to loyal customers.

I picked up my replacement Apple Watch 7 this afternoon. It was still on watchOS 8, so I had to update it first. 😒

Then my first pairing as a new watch failed: It finished the set-up but hadn't downloaded most built-in Apple apps. After rebooting, the watch wanted to start pairing all over again. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Well, so I paired the watch once more, again as a new watch. Now it's ready, with no third-party apps. I should know by Saturday whether I got normal battery life again.