Apple Watch Ultra battery draining while on charge after updating to OS 10.1

My brand new Ultra 2 went from 2-2.5 days of battery before the update, to going from 100% to 20 percent in less than 5 hours.

It does charge and it does not overheat. This is NOT normal behaviour due to rebuild of caches or other such mumbo jumbo.

Reboots, and restores without backups make no difference (as others have allready reported), presumably going back to 10.0 might make a difference but that is not possible.

Hoping a fix comes quickly. For now, I put it in Energy saving mode, that seems to bypass whatever process is sucking up energy (though it is a somewhat crippled device now).

Remember, to do an update, the battery needs to be over 50%, if being on a charger and the device is still discharging, how is that ever going to happen?

Apple is going to need to do something a bit more than just an emergency fix.

After a couple of un-pairing / repairing, new set-up, etc... I finally threw in the towel and contacted support. Got past the first level which told me I was running a Beta. Second level ran diagnostics and said that there were temperature flags set on everything on the watch except the battery! Set up the replacement and hopefully I'll have a new watch soon and send this one back. Yesterday afternoon got pretty rough with it - I couldn't get it charge more than 10% at a time before it would start overheating. It got a little better after I re-setup as a new watch, but still started depleting 1% every 5 minutes or so.

I am also experiencing the same issues. I have the ultra 1 (iPhone 13 pro max), less than a year old and updated (not beta) to the new version. The battery drain is incredible. Less than 8 hours and I'm almost at 0. I am not experiencing overheating from the watch and it is charging, but does take most of the night. Went to the gym for one hour and lost 20% of charge. Apple needs to fix this.

I have the SE(2023). It's about a month old. I updated my Apple Watch iOS this morning. After the update, it immediately became buggy. It responded slowly. It drained the battery in less than 2 hours. It is taking a very long time to recharge. It "bricks" and does not respond to taps. I have restarted it twice. I have been on with customer support. They suggested I unpair it. It took about two minutes, and in that time the charge went from 35% to zero. Now they want me to take it in for repairs. Please just fix the bug and send out a patch, Apple!

So, in my case, I did a factory reset of my Series 7. Along with that, I made sure no third-party apps installed (if some installed, I promptly uninstalled them). So far, I'm having no battery drain issues. 🙂 👍🏻 ⌚️

Short story

2 watches series 7 & 9

Both updated to 10.1

Both dying around 3 hours from 100%

Tried restore. Didn’t help

Spoke with Apple technician via phone recommended deleting all third party apps.

Success 2% drain in 45 minutes.

With this battery drain and it getting hot, my watch is pretty much useless now. It doesn’t keep a charge long enough to use. Even in low battery mode it drains and then takes a very long time to charge. I’m worrying about the effect this is having to the life expectancy of the battery. I just want to be able to use my watch again.

Someone posted that they deleted the Mobyface app from their watch and it fixed the issue. I deleted it and all other non-Apple apps from the watch and it has gone back to working normally.

If you haven't already, it is worth trying and I hope it works for some of you as this is a super irritating issue.

I have the same issue. I have to turn the watch on and off each time I charge, however the battery is draining super fast when it’s not charging. When I turn it and off before charging it charges super fast. So I would try that.

Thank you! This worked for me too. I did have the MobyFace app and removed everything 3rd party except my sleep app & audible and my battery function is better both while charging and holding the charge. It has only dropped 2% in 4hrs instead of 90%.

I’ve been having problems for last 2 days since the 10.1 update, was only holding charge for 3 hours at best and I literally turned everything off to see if it helped which it didn’t, I’ve seen a post about the mobyfox app and if u turn it off it might work, well it has!!! My battery was at 77% when on dropped to 65% within 30mins as soon as I switched it off it’s stopped draining it’s been about 1h30m and I’m at 63% hope this helps someone else

So, is this how software is supposed to work? Like a new engine that needs to be “smoothed”? Really? Can anyone PLEASE explain this request to wait 24 hours? I have received the very same answer when I told them my M1 iPad 5th gen was outperformed by my iPad 3rd gen: “give it a day or so and it will adjust itself”. Well, I never knew the conclusion, as I sold the older one…

I am having the same issue and started (again) for solutions and ran across a thread that might have a (temporary) solution until a fix is released. They were saying deleting 3rd party apps, particularly MobyFace, clears it up. I'm trying it now.

After going through all the suggestions everyone has tried, the only thing I found that worked was to roll back the update to watch os 9 and start over. Running thing is that when I did that the watch went back to 10.1 but a different build. If you have the option to roll it back do it. If not, you may be still waiting for the patch( or update) to fix yours. DEFINITELY A SOFTWARE ISSUE!!!!

There is nothing hardware related to the watches. Hopefully this helps.

FYI, I started day with 100% at 7:15 est and now my watch is at 100% at 9:46 est.

Good luck.