Battery drain with watches 9.2

Well, have done this twice in two days with Apple Watch 7 and WatchOS 9.2 but did not solve for me. Based on recommendation, I am setting up my watch for the third time but *NOT* Restoring from Backup but setting up as new watch. I will look for the Background App Refresh and Walkie-Talkie settings to make sure they are off.

justa side note, but even if this workaround keeps your watch running, it’s still a terrible user experience and Apple needs to fix it.

apps are designed with the assumption that they will be running in the background, and a ton of app features will simply stop working without it. :[

Same for series 7

i did the update early in the morning before I start my day. It is drained down to 30% with normal use that would have it to 75%+ before the update every other per day. Same workouts, walking etc

initialy I thought to give it another day before posting but it became so bad I came here to see if anyone else is experiencing this and saw your thread.

I upgraded to watch os 9.2. My watch immediately started draining in minutes. It used to last all day. I have wiped the watch and re-paired. I have reset phone and watch. I have turned off background app refresh, walkie talkie and everything else possible. Nothing is working. It still drains quick. In addition, contacts is 8 gb on watch -- what the heck is going on. I don't have that many contacts!

Definitely a bug in 9.2. Is anyone from Apple monitoring this forum? It seems to be a widespread problem.

Help appreciated. Ideally a patch. Thanks

Thanks Will

I did try setting up as new watch and it still has gone back to draining. However, I will try again and see if I can get this to work...

Apple has always been pretty ruthless about not properly supporting older products but I think the Apple Watch 4 is fairly recent and might even still be sold... Anyway, a new watch might be the only solution :-(

I have a Series 7 and experienced same issues since 9.2 came out. I unpaired and re-paired 4 times (NOT from backup) and finally gave up w/ the expectation that 9.3 would hopefully fix the issue. 9.3 has come out, I've updated, restarted, reset and finally unpaired, re-paired another 2 times since and still no slowing down this battery drain. I just spoke w/ Genius Bar who ran diagnostics and said they can't see anything wrong w/ the watch but to do further software-based tests it will cost $430. Does anyone have a cheaper solution? I've tried everything I know + have learned from this board. If I'm going to spend $430 JUST for diagnostics on a Series 7 I might as well get a new watch. Is the Series 8 experiencing similar issues?

No such problem here. Still on 72% after 8 hours. SE2022

I've re-booted my phone, watch, unpaired and it's still draining ridiculously fast.

I don't have that many apps running, and very few notifications.

Any ideas?

Great. Thx Stephan for the helpful suggestion. I'm going to try it...fingers crossed this trick does it!