Battery Draining After WatchOS 9.2 Update

I tried all the above suggestions such as resetting the watch and my iPhone – nothing worked. I was surprised to find that I could talk to someone at apple here in the UK with it being New Year’s Eve but I managed to (UK 0800 107 6285). This lady asked if I had reset my watch using a backup which I had. She suggested resetting it from scratch on my iPhone as if it was a new watch. I did and SUCCESS! 

Device: Watch Series 4 LTE & Cellular

One morning I began working out for 30 minutes, battery drained from 100% to 45%. Then I just observed on non-activity mode, in 2 minutes it suddenly dropped to 38%.

Next day it did same thing.

Then,

Here are the following steps I performed to fix my watch which had battery drain issue after updating to 9.3.

Steps:

1) Back up your watch

2) unpair and complete erase and reset.

3) Repair it.

4) select the backup.(I decided to use back up for Watch from 2019 it still updated to 9.3 OS

5) after pairing, removed all unwanted apps.

6) turned off unwanted notifications and background refresh.

7) Turned of any continuous sensor functions:Noise , Low High heart rate and so on.

It works perfect.

I don’t use cellular at all.

My guess is- the new software requires completely erased hardware. I could be wrong. But it’s a guess.

same thing goes with phones that are draining batteries. Back it up and reset it for the new software upgrade to land on hardware independently and not intersect with old software.

hope it helps.

After many resets of the watch and phone, this morning I found a reddit post that indicated that having the phone time zone set to a specific time rather than automatic may be causing the problem. As I travel for business every month I have my phone on specific time zones. I set it to automatic turned of all watch updates and connections. Reset the phone and watch and this seems to have fixed the problem. Down to 84% in 10 hours rather than 10 minutes before. Hope this helps some users.

**EASY SOLUTION**

After every update, the device (watch phone iPad or whatever) needs to catch up again, load cache, optimising apps etc.

THIS process will put a load on the CPU, the device will get warm, drain battery and if you use it you will see a drop on performance.

Apple devices is great machine witch are made to run indefinitely without a need for reboot, even MacBooks works better when not shut off an turn on every day.

So to recap:

JUST WAIT A DAY

My fix - Unpair watch from phone. Re-pair watch to phone and when it asks what date to use for backup, use a date prior to your 9.3 update. Once re-paired with phone, you can do the software update and it should work fine. Not sure why tech support didn't immediately recommend this.

Try a forced restart of both your iPhone and Watch. Phone first and while it is on the Apple logo do the same for your watch.

In my case simply restarting the phone and watch almost simultaneously (restart phone, when apple logo appears, restart watch) solved the problem. I don’t have any unusual time settings.

Fixed! Did a Reset, Erase All Content and Settings on the watch itself. Restored from back up, and the problem is gone.

Here is an update, I did reset it again and also fixed the time zone. 100% 0800 and 60% 1600. I guess it is back

Well, I’ve narrowed it down to cellular is definitely draining my battery. Had my phone on me multiple days at work this week and the battery was fine those days, at 64% 13 hours after full charge as opposed to 4-5 hours. Battery does still drain faster than I would prefer when tracking a fitness activity (almost 10% for a 35 minute jog), but still manageable if I remain in range of my phone. No sense in paying for a service that is draining my battery, so canceled my cellular service and will hopefully re-up it once Apple figures out a fix in a future software update 😞

On about day 6 mine improved drastically, although still at 80% of what it was before, meaning that if I have a very active day, it probably won't last all-day anymore. I also have a few functions (O2 etc) turned off most of the time now, which is frustrating, because why do I need an Apple Watch if I can't make use of it's functions.

This is the third watch now, same problem with them all. One year old SE, brand new SE 2nd gen, now an 8. All same battery issue. Has to be either the phone update or the watch update or both. I’ve tried everything mentioned several times to no avail. I won’t throw one more penny at this problem. It’s an Apple issue.

Yesterday I updated my series 5 watch to iOS 9.2 after a full recharge. The battery was drained in 4 hours. I can actually swipe up several times and watch the power drop. I have reset restarted erased repaired with my phone last night after a full charge. This morning the battery is dead after 6 hours. Thanks Apple. When will you fix the bug.

Dropped below 10% three times today. Charged for about an hour the first two times and it's on the charger again now. The second time, I powered the watch off before putting on the charger so it had to reboot. WTH??

WatchOS 9.2 Apple Watch Series 5