Apple Watch Battery Draining suddenly after Software Update

After the update with Apple Watch, it has fixed the issue. Please update the watch as well. I did yesterday night at 8 PM (full 100%) battery and this morning it is 88%. Otherwise it would have gone to 0 after 4 hours.

Thanks for posting! Apple support suggested the watch needed to be updated but it kept getting stuck in preparing.

So far so good, I think I’ll wait awhile to install the update 😬

So for anyone reading, the steps I followed:

Reset watch. On iPhone, open watch app. Go to general. Software Update. Toggle off the automatic updates. Now on the watch, go to settings. General storage. Find watchOS 10.4 and delete it.

I had the same issue with an UW2. Tried everything. Software is totally up to date on all devices. What worked - seemingly for now - was putting the watch in low power mode for a few hours. I did it overnight. Drain totally stopped. Then I took it out of low or power mode and the battery seems to be operating normally. Hard to say why that would work, but maybe it will work for others.

I unpaired the watch, shut off both phone and watch for a few minutes, then re-paired the watch. This fixed the problem for me.

hope this helps someone..

Same issue, I deleted the OS 10.4 download from Storage in the Watch App and turned off the Automatic Updates.

My battery is back to normal and no longer draining.

This seems to work. My belief now is that it”s not the iOS update but the update for watch os that stays in a preparing mode and keeps communicating with the iPhone.

turning off the automatic updates for the Apple Watch helps. For now…

This worked for me too. I deleted the 10.4 update from my storage, then turned auto update off and on from my watch. I then selected to download and install directly from my watch and it worked!

It took awhile but I finally got the watch to update and that seems to have helped the battery drain. I toggled off background app refresh (based on the rec of another poster) and that seems to have fixed the problem with the watch update.

Update all your Apple devices, including your watch. Once all were updated I stopped having the battery drain on my watch. It’s working normally.

Same issue, I have the Series 8 Watch... hoping to find some resolution to this soon... gonna read the thread entirely and see if any tips are discussed! Can barely get a day out of the watch, when I used to get about 2 days... but I did just make an improvement that got me from a 1/2 day to a full day... the setting I found helped was turning the minimum brightness setting OFF under Watch Settings>Accessibility>Minimum Brightness (tip from apple support). Another setting I know helped in the past was Accessibility>Reduce Motion setting to the ON position (about 6 months ago when I had a similar issue). On another note, whether I have the Display & Brightness>Always On setting set either on or off, it doesn't really help either way, so I'm just leaving it on... never seemed to change the result in the past either.

On another note, my hubby has the Watch SE from last xmas and has not had a single issue with his. We both have the iPhone 14 Pro with iOS Version 17.4.1 and then Watch OS Version 10.4.

Jeff Donald, I have tried already all of these, even factory reset of my phone and no backup restore,just simply loggin in back to my apple id... and the same issue persisted with 4 different watches. At least in my case the issue is horrible, it's syncing soemthing from my icloud. I have an escalated case with Apple Support to the engineering team, and they responses after several diagnoses and loggin profiles that it's a known issue, they are working on it. But Goood, it has been 1 month ago...

Did someone update to 18 Beta on phone? Afterall I was like maybe they have fixed this on it, but unfortunatelly nothing changed :(

Was having the same dead battery issue and it took forever to charge.. So I just turned it off and turned it back on and it seems to be holding a charge so far! Did not try updating it.

Same issue, I deleted the OS 10.4 download from Storage in the Watch App and turned off the Automatic Updates.

My battery is back to normal and no longer draining.

For me, updating the watch to the latest SW update fixed it for me.

I fixed it by using the watch a day on battery savings mode and a day using a watch face that’s mainly black (with an almost on screen). After that, battery behaves normal again.