Apple Watch Battery Draining suddenly after Software Update

same issue here I’ve had my Apple Watch Ultra for almost 8 months and have never ever run it out of charge in a day. First day I got the new update set up on my phone. My watch burned through 92% in less than eight hours. I have restarted both devices and it has seemed to improve things a little bit, but I’m still burning through 40 to 60% of my battery consistently now on a daily basis. Prior to the update, I was able to get almost 3 days between charges.

Experienced the same issue as everyone else here.

Apple Watch SE charged before bed, dead in the morning. Charged to 80%, put it back on, looked at it mid-afternoon, dead.

I WAS ABLE TO FIX IT BY charging the watch to at least 50% and then while still on the charger, upgrading it to Watch OS 10.4 (it was previously on 10.3). The update took a while to download but did eventually work.

After this, battery performance has returned to normal.

Same issue, except my watch updated and I’m still having the battery life drain. I can go all day without having low power mode come on and now it comes on by 5:00pm and dies before I go to bed. Even after both iPhone and watch are up to date it’s still happening.

Mine installed without problem (10.4.1) and now suddenly got this battery drain problem, is there any workaround for this until we wait for a fix? And it’s 4 days already for me, it doesn’t matter if I close everything, restart etc problem stays there

what I’ve learned so far…

Updating iPhone to 17.4.1 prompted an auto update of the watch to 10.4. That got stuck at around 2/3 into “preparing”, and caused the watch battery to drain quickly. At that point I wasn’t even aware that my watch was trying to install an update.

After visiting this thread I used the workaround of disabling the auto-update function on the watch app on iPhone and deleting the pending 10.4 from my watch.

Yesterday I contacted Apple, who ran some diagnostics on my watch and told me the problem was with poor communication between watch and phone. They talked me through uncoupling the watch and phone, reconnecting them, and then installing the 10.4 update on the watch.

My watch and phone are both now running on up to date software, and (so far) the battery life of my watch seems normal. Apple gave me a link to use so I can pick up the support again if I encounter any problems.

If you have AppleCare for your watch I recommend contacting Apple for help. They did a cool screen-sharing thing on my phone to show me what to do whilst they talked to me.

Hope that helps anyone still having problems.

Similar issue starting 2 days ago: rapid battery drain AND activity rings spinning up even when inactive (sleeping). Was concerned it was a health issue. We'll assume its a watch issue and give Apple a chance to address in an update. Was going to stop by Apple store but we'll give it a chance. Will report to support.

There is absolutely a problem after the latest update. Watch will be at 98% when I start a workout while listening to a podcast, and it dies after just over 30 minutes. APPLE - it's broken. PLEASE wake up and fix it!! You don't keep customers by burying your head in the sand.

I was just on the phone with Apple today because my watch has been going from fully charged to dead in less than eight hours and getting worse since the update. Putting it on low battery power doesn't help. I added cell service to see if that would help but it didn't. My apple care warranty expires in five days (5/21/24) so I called today hoping for a replacement.

After going through all the steps to diagnose the problem, the phone rep who was actually a delightful young lady, tells me that because the battery diagnostic test showed no problems, my watch wasn't eligible for replacement. She elaborated further saying that it was likely a 'software' issue which isn't covered under the warranty.

Then miraculously as our conversation is about to end, the rep tells me it looks like there is a software update I need to make. With this update, I seem to be losing about 3.7 percent of battery power each hour vs the 10-20 percent per hours I was losing after that last update. I still think that is unacceptable, but this clearly proved it's a software issue. Now I am at the mercy of Apple to not turn my watch into an expensive paperweight.

Anyway...that's my experience.

same issue here, it's the 3rd time my watch's battery drained within 3-hour after ios update. Then, the battery issue continued for the next 2-3 days before it gets back to normal. I have no clue why this happened and I still couldn't find a solution online.

I’m also having the same issue.

The battery doesn’t last a full day (morning to night) on the series 5.

Before, the battery was reaching around 40% at the end of the day.

The issue started after the watchOS 10.4 update, and it’s still there after the watchOS 10.5 update, the update didn’t solve the issue.

I changed the iPhone that’s paired with the watch, that also didn’t solve the issue.

Has anybody found a solution for this, other than erasing content/repairing? Those don't work for me, I have tried 10x, but any watch I am pairing to my iphone drains drastically. I had faith in 17.5.1 update from yesterday, as they wrote they have fixed several important bugs, but I see no change.

Those who STILL face this issue on 21.05.2024 or afterwards, can you please check your phone's and watch's storage? Isn't the "other"/system data section very big?

Here’s the workaround I used (no thanks to Apple). Unpair the watch, turn off phone and watch, turn back on, pair again.

Very frustrating that Apple hasn’t addressed this. The least they could do is give a heads up to the user when the device calls for an update.

hope this helps someone else.

Updates 10.5 and 10.4 each caused battery drain on series 9 watch bought in January. Restart solved problem with 10.4 but with 10.5, problem persists. I have almost 30gb of music on the watch so I'm reluctant to unpair and return it to factory settings. It took 4 days to load everything in the first place - so incredibly slow. Advice like turn off always on, lower brightness, turn off background app refresh etc negate the reasons I bought it in the first place. If every update means I can't use lots of its functions, what is the point? Apple really needs to sort this out. It is beyond frustrating and annoying.

This just started for my SE Apple Watch with the iOS 17.5.1. Seems the iPhone and watch aren’t connecting on location service related to widgets, weather, calendar and maps. All the apps keep asking me to permit on the iPhone. And on the Apple Watch it keeps asking me to allow weather. The Apple Watch has weather, calendar, and compass greyed out.

this same issued happened last year and it was an iPhone iOS issue that caused this chaos.

i wish Apple could get this iOS stuff correct!!

And last year did they fix it at the end? I really tried everything, unpairing, factory reset for iphone, but for me this battery drain continues on whenever I login back to my icloud account... Really really disappointed, tried everything I read across forums