Apple Watch Battery Drain Issues after Update

I’ve been having the same issue with battery drain on my Apple Watch SE, going from 100% to 60% in about an hour since this update, when pre-update it’d easily last all day. Apple Support advised to unpair & completely reset my watch to no avail so clearly it’s the update causing this, & they need to fix up fast!

Everyone!!!!

pay attention

I did this test on my watch yesterday and has worked for me

I remove it from my iPhone, did all the disconnections including the Bluetooth out.

I put it on the charger alone without anything else charging

let it get to 100%. Then I connected it again and the battery remain normal.

i normally wake up at 4:50 am to workout. It has been 5 hours (10:27 am central time) and it is at 82%

I have also took off all the notifications since I have my phone near me, only let it be use for calls

this is the model I have MG193LL/A

After 2 weeks, restoring my iPhone in recovery mode, and updating my iPhone to the latest IOS my watch seems to be back to normal, not sure which of those things did it, but it seems to have worked.

My watch now has comparable battery life to before the update, and actually lasts longer if I use the new low power mode feature.

I experienced similar post-software update, with battery losing considerable charge eg down to 6% after 24 hours. A couple days ago I thought to switch my watch off and back on and, lo and behold, I’m back to approx 50% after 24 hours. Give it a go!

I finally had success today by unpairing my watch, then re-pairing. Then I powered down both and left off for a while. Then when fully charged, I uninstalled and reinstalled the latest OS on my iPhone.

Before, my battery died within 3 hrs, without any workouts, music, etc that I typically do. Today, it is still at 51% at 4:20 pm, after being 100% at 4:00 this morning.

i hot you get the same result! 🤞🏼

Same thing with my Apple Watch 6. The only thing that seems to help is turning off the always on display. That was the whole reason for getting the 6. After turning it off the battery drain is much slower.

For what it's worth, I made a backup of my S4 watch and deleted/repaired the whole thing back to "factory" WatchOS10. Battery life has been greatly improved. A big pain but if you have a backup and time to spare, it's been worth it for me.

Yes. I had the same problem for a week. I kept a close eye on it and the watch was definitely draining the battery faster than before the update. There was the restart after the update and I left it at that. That's when I first noticed the quicker drop in power during the day. I wear my watch at night and the next I would get wake up and it was a few percentage points below from where I had started before I did my update. I turned off the watch and restarted and the problem stayed with me. Finally after several more days I did another shut down and restart. Now my watch is running how it used to run before the update. Right now I'm okay with it.

I wasn't having any issues after updating to watchOS 10.0 (or any of the sub-updates) outside of the weather complication glitch, but just updated yesterday to watchOS10.1 on both my Apple Watch Ultra and my wife's Series 8. We couldn't get past the 80% charge (even after turning off Optimized Battery Health in order to charge it to full last night), so when we went to sleep last night they were both at 80%. My Ultra drained to 5% in 7 hours (I would've lost maybe 5-10% over that time period in the past) and my wife's Series 8 lost all its battery and went into Power Reserve. Not only that, but I seem to have lost the ability to fast charge my Ultra (tried two different chargers).

Called Apple Support this morning - I was a bit concerned when the person I spoke with asked whether the watchOS10.1 was a beta version as they hadn't released 10.1 yet (I've never run a beta version of any of the OS on any of our devices before). She ran a diagnostic, and everything was fine (not surprised). Her solutions were either to go to an Apple Store (which seemed like it wouldn't make sense, since to me this seems like a software issue so what is an individual at the store going to be able to do), or she would issue a ticket to some internal site, and if that gets enough 'hits' or 'votes' then it will be a priority for the engineers to work on that issue in an upcoming update. I'm assuming they will be receiving plenty of calls with a battery issue that essentially makes the watch obsolete, but I'll encourage others to contact Apple Support if they're having similar issues to make sure it's on their radar. Be prepared to not get a solution, but hopefully with enough calls, the problem will get solved.

I will say I've been disappointed with the recent OS rollouts (I'm a huge Apple Fan - have all the devices), but iOS17 gave us issues with morning alarms, I saw a complication glitch with weather in watchOS 10, and this issue is huge. From here on out, I'll be thinking twice about running an update immediately (fool me once...).

Yes, we can easily surmise this is a software issue. What we don't know is which software at fault, or even more critically, why some watch owners are affected severely, some moderately, and others, not at all. The difference can't really be explained by how the watches are used. We have two in our household and both are used in essentially the same way. One is unaffected. The other drains far more quickly than before (but not as badly as some report here).

Personally, I suspect it's got something to do with wi-fi or Bluetooth, a theory that wouldn't be difficult to test. A person with severe battery drain could turn off wi-fi on their watch and keep their phone in pairing distance for a few hours and see what happens. Then try the same with Bluetooth.

After posting in this group yesterday, trying all the suggestions of unpairing & re-pairing, hard restart, hours & hours on the charger, I decided to seek support from Apple, starting with the chat. They’re able to, with your approval, run diagnostics on the watch, & the battery, & escalate the situation to someone on the phone. My diagnostic on the battery was unable to be completed because the watch has to be on for at least 6 hours, which mine hasn’t been on longer than 2 hours after the software upgrade…EXCEPT on the charger. So I have to get back with them this evening, after my phone has been on for 6 hours. They know there’s an issue, but they need more information on what is going on to find what’s causing it & therefore how to fix it. I encourage everyone who’s having the issue to reach out to Apple & let them run the diagnostics on their watch so they can collect enough data to find the problem & fix it.

Last night after a 2 hour call with Apple Support in which the tech did everything he could think of, I decided to

remove the Moby Face App from my phone took off my Ultra v1 put it on the charger. This morning it was at 100% and I have the most location driven face turned on with elevation, temperature everything that could possibly use the battery just like yesterday. So far the battery has not moved since 6am EDT. Last night I watched the power drain 4% in 4 minutes while on with Support. I’ll report later if my issue has been resolved.

How exactly did they “made” you buy a new watch? My husband, seen my frustration told me to a buy a new watch too. I said “no” because it is a software not a hardware issue. For me taking off 3rd party software Moby Face helped a lot. My watch still warmer than normal on my wrist, the battery draining is about 80% normal but I can’t instal the oxygen measure or EKG on the face of the watch. It is important to me due to health issues.

i suggest uninstalling all face apps if you have any. If you don’t, try to uninstall all their part app for now until they update.

I hope that helps.

My watch has been doing much better since I uninstalled mobyface as recommended. I charged mine up 100% at 7:30 am and it's 1:05 pm and I still have 83% battery left, yesterday it would've been dead by 8:30 am. Thanks for the help.

ibe had the Same issues since updating to ios10.1 last night. Been playing with it all afternoon and think I’ve sorted it.

1. turn off location services
2. delete all 3rd party apps
3. hard reset watch
4. reboot and reinstall from last data save after 3rd party apps deleted
5. so far so good. Infact been on 73% for half an hour.