WatchOS 10 battery life

Gilles wrote:

I think this is why.

Watch 5 have roughly reached 75/80% health.

And it looks like Watch OS 10 is killing old batteries.

If your battery is below 80%, it needs to be replaced. You were going to start having issues regardless of whether or not you had upgraded.

Not sure about this to be honest. Reduction of battery life, yes of course. Dividing it by 2 after an upgrade, not coherent.

Or this proves Apple is managing planned obsolescence...as they did with iphones a few years ago and had to revert with a new os update

Gilles wrote:

Not sure about this to be honest. Reduction of battery life, yes of course. Dividing it by 2 after an upgrade, not coherent.

Post Hoc Fallacy

Or this proves Apple is managing planned obsolescence...as they did with iphones a few years ago and had to revert with a new os update

Oh, gosh, not that again. Apple did not cause the batteries to degrade. A couple of years back, Apple introduced a function in iOS to throttle the performance of phones that already had seriously degraded batteries. The purpose of this was to prevent the phones from suddenly shutting off, potentially leaving a customer without a phone in an emergency. And they didn't get in trouble for that. What they got in trouble for was not properly informing customers of this.

That feature was never removed. It still exists in iOS 17.

Series 5 here. Before the 10.0 update, the watch battery was seldom less that 30% when I put it on the charger at night. Now I am fortunate to end the day with 15% and sometimes it goes into power saving mode in the evening. This never happened before the update. Restarting the watch doesn't seem to help. I've seen excess watch battery usage for a day or so after updates before, but this one is more than a week old and it's still bad. Maybe not as bad as some report, but close to making the watch nonfunctional, as I can now no longer count on it run for an entire day.

My watch SE (2) with 94% battery health was lasting less the three hours with the watch faces constantly crashing and restarting. Removing all weather compilations from the faces and closing the weather app in the background seems to have fixed the problem. You could try doing the same thing.

My battery life is awful after upgrading to iOS10. Drains to zero IN HOURS. Is there anyway to determine which apps / features are using the most battery life like there is on the General —> Battery function on the iPhone?

I've managed to get a replacement of my AW 5 by Apple for free.

The battery capacity was 75%

What is funny is that now the battery capacity is confirmed at 100%, but the battery is 60% after only 5 hours. And I'm at home with good wifi. Usually it gets worse out of home.

I'll see if it gets better after a few days.

I can literally watch the battery life go down as I’m watching it. Please, Apple, fix this asap!!!!!! I update my watch and all Apple devices immediately trusting things won’t go bad but 10.0.1 watch update is terrible for battery life!

So it turns out that it didn't fix the problem for very long. I ended up chatting with Apple support and they ran remote diagnostics and couldn't find anything wrong. As it's under warranty I've returned it to them asking to be downgraded to watchOS 9 as that worked fine.

Mitch Stone wrote:

FYI, this tip doesn't help at all, at least not for me. I switched to a watch face with only two complications, and no weather functions at all, and my battery usage now is even worse than it was before. In around 8 hours I am down to 40%. Since this is the level I used to see after 15-16 hours, I estimate that the watch is using roughly twice as much power now as it did before watchOS 10. So this the source of the problem, clearly. If anyone has spoken to Apple about this and had any answers from them, I would grateful if you could pass along what you've heard.

As you didn’t have an immediate answer to my two questions I deduce that the user tip didn’t work because you didn’t work through it.

im also seeing a massive decrease in Iwatch battery life after iOS 10. I used to be able to go 4 days with my ultra 1 in power save mode without charging now I can barely make it 24 hours.

had I knew this was going to be the case I would not have spent $1000 on this watch. I hope that address this issue soon. I bought the ultra bc of the better battery life in the first place.

i power cycled the watch and the phone and hope that helps but I’m not optimistic

Just to let you know, my brand new watch 5 (with new battery 100% capacity) started full at 8:30 in the morning, and is at 20:20 at 25% left.

This is much below what it should be...

Let's see if the next update fixes something.

Gilles wrote:

Just to let you know, my brand new watch 5 (with new battery 100% capacity) started full at 8:30 in the morning, and is at 20:20 at 25% left.

This is much below what it should be...

Let's see if the next update fixes something.

A “brand new” series 5 must have been at the back of the store shelf for 4 years or maybe you were sold a pup.

Darn. If it’s that bad I’d try a factory restore if that an option.

my ultra 1 has now settled down and I’m getting good battery life again. You definitely have something running that’s draining it I’d say.

The most useful advice I have seen so far is to turn off the Noise app in the Watch settings. Having done this hasn't returned battery life to what it was before watchOS 10, but it looks like my Series 5 will go at least 20 hours now, when it was previously much less. Enough to get through a day at least, and until Apple fixes this problem. Hope this helps someone else.