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Apple Watch battery drains super fast after 10.1 update.

Series 7 Apple Watch. After 10.1 update my battery only lasts a few hours. I can literally watch the percentage go down. Rebooted the watch. Shut off background app refresh after advised by a friend. Still drains ridiculously fast. It’s essentially useless now. I’m out of ideas. Anyone else have this problem? This is crazy.

Posted on Oct 25, 2023 9:56 PM

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Posted on Dec 3, 2023 6:33 AM

My watch used to last two days, even with me running an hour a day. I no longer run and now it drains faster. I have to put it on the charger overnight and again mid-day. Normally, it takes about an hour to charge. But there are days that it takes up to five hours to hit 100%. I haven’t added anything or changed any settings since I got it almost two years ago.

704 replies

Nov 9, 2023 6:03 AM in response to bo_tanaka

Same here 10.1.1 made the battery drain worse than 10.1. Both are worse than watchOS 9. Apple watchOS 10.x.x is some of the most unstable and unreliable software I have ever seen from Apple in decades. Reminds me of the old days of windows 98. The only thing I have been able to do to get overnight performance then 14 hours during the day (charging twice per day), is to remove all 3rd party apps, delete all deletable apple apps that are not critical to my use, disable background refresh, get rid of Apple weather and Apple world clock apps and turn off location services. By the way, my battery capacity is 84%, my watch passes all Apple diagnostics (twice now) and Apple will only replace the battery for a fee of $299 (because the battery has over 80% capacity). Apple absolutely claims not have the ability to roll my watch back to watchOS 9.6.3. THIS IS NOT what made Apple a multi-trillion dollar company that people trusted.

Nov 9, 2023 6:07 PM in response to haresh68

Try a couple of charge cycles and if that doesn’t work, then try impairing and then pairing the watch again as a new watch. There’s a good chance that will help. There are a lot of little things going on in the background after an update, so that’s why you see the severe battery drain Which can take a couple of charge cycles until all extra background processes stop.

Nov 15, 2023 9:38 AM in response to tony.d.

Series 8 watch. Battery died within a few hours after 10.1.1 update and continued to die for six days. Did all the troubleshooting listed here (no Mobyface on my watch, unpaired/paired, turned off background updates, etc). Finally did the chat thing with Apple and they ran the analytics and said "software appears OK". Scheduled a call. But before the call (this am) and just after the support chat the battery came back and now seems to be ok (60% after 14 hours). I told the Apple call support person of my troubles but not sure if that goes anywhere. Also sent to Apple Feedback. The same thing happened with the 10.1 update but battery drain was gone after three days. Was it the "analytics" test that fixed it? Or just a coincidence? Really a big fail for Apple. They should at least make this problem clear to customers and save us all a lot of trouble (yes, I've told them).

Nov 15, 2023 1:00 PM in response to tony.d.

So very tired of watchOS 10. Bought a Garmin smart watch to compare. After a week of using the Garmin, I think Apple Watch is in trouble. The Garmin watch has battery life measured in weeks, NOT HOURS. Garmin interfaces quite well with my iPhone. Menu designs and user experience is intuitive. Loved my Apple Watch on watchOS 9.6.3, but watchOS 10 is dead on arrival.

Nov 16, 2023 2:50 AM in response to drcures

I have a series 7 and series 8- both watch batteries drained to nothing in in 2-3 hours after I downloaded the 10.1 update. But then I deleted some stuff I never use, turned them off and the problem was solved. Now a get well over a day in power before recharging. I too turn off the always on feature- it's a waste of power since most of the time you are not staring at your watch!

Nov 28, 2023 10:41 AM in response to Zenguin

Yep, I have a lot of time on my hands, so I went back, one by one, and started deleting all recent apps. Waited a day in between each one, to see what would happen over time.

MOBYFACE did it. Instead of draining my battery to 25% by noon same day, I had 86% left after a full day, AFTER removing MOBYFACE.

All is well. Even restored all dwnloaded apps EXCEPT MOBYFACE, and it's back to normal.

Re-Installed it, HUGE DRAIN again.

Nov 28, 2023 11:50 AM in response to heatherlgreg

It's a third party app so not everyone has it.


While it definitely looks like some folks are getting relief by removing it, it's definitely not the underlying issue with the 10.X updates.


I removed Paprika 3 (a recipe app) and Spotify (I never use) from my watch yesterday after reading this thread. My watch died at around 8.5 hours and took over 4 hours on the charger to turn back on after dying last night. After that time, it was only at 16% battery and then seemingly charged normally overnight.


This morning I took it off the charger at 7am and it is now at 76% battery as of writing this. I have not directly used it for anything today except passive time checking.


While I can appreciate that these issues point to a bad battery, none of this was happening until the 10.X updates rolled out. My watch was working, charging and holding a charge perfectly fine until then.

Apple Watch battery drains super fast after 10.1 update.

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