Apple Watch Battery Drain after updating to 10.5

I've done this forced restart now twice. I have never had an issue with the battery running out before. Now every night before even 7 pm it is almost out of battery. I can't get in all my steps or anything else because I have to put it on the charger. This has to be due to a recent update. Please have them look into this because it is ridiculous and I have had many versions of the apple watch and never had a problem before now. Thank you

I experienced the same thing. I’m using series 5 and would normally last the whole day with always on display turned on. But after 10.5 updates it only lasted 2-3 hours. I unpaired/paired and it does the same thing. I’m waiting for the next update to get away with this cuz it’s a bug! It’s frustrating to wear a watch thats off and drained battery.

Do a forced restart of your Apple Watch. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do a forced restart please review the Apple Support article I linked below. After the forced restart the battery usage should return to former levels in 24 to 72 hours. After an update the Watch performs indexing of data in the background and this can consume a lot of battery power.

If high battery usage persists after 72 hours please unpair your Apple Watch and iPhone, restart both devices and then pair them again.

If your Apple Watch is stuck on the Apple logo - Apple Support

Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Series 7, recently updated to 10.5 - has a noticeably faster battery drain for me. I use always-on and wear it to bed for sleep tracking. Previously I could always get a full day out of the watch. I will charge every evening around 5pm, at which point it would “end” the day with 30% charge. The last few months on v10.4 it would be down to 10-20% but almost always make it through the day (could be from that update or age). Then after this update it keeps hitting 10% around 2pm and I have to go into low power mode.

I originally had not changed anything during the update process. Since updating to 10.5 I have turned off background refresh on a number of apps, restarted the watch multiple times, turned the brightness down to the lowest option, and 2 days ago turned off hand-off which I discovered could be a problem after some digging. None of these have seemingly made much improvement, which is why I’m wondering if there is a bug, or other new feature introduced that is causing this faster power consumption.

I did. I did the reset first because I saw it on another post and waited the time you said and it did nothing. So then I did the reset again but because I found this post, so because I had already did the reset earlier and waited the right amount of time, I did the unpairing and re-pairing. This should not be this complicated for all of your users. Again, is anyone looking into fixing the issue that they created? This is Apple's fault and not ours and we should not have do jump through this many hoops just to get a watch that we paid a lot of money for to work properly

I followed Jeff Donald's advice of a "Forced Restart" yesterday and it appears to have fixed the problem (if you were following my notes on the above post, it is now 4:30pm and my watch is at 21% today). This clearly does something different than just powering it off and back on again.

Forced Restart: hold down side button and crown at the same time for about 10 seconds until the apple logo appears.

I am having the same issue. I have the 45mm series 7 watch, and iphone 14 pro max I did do a force restart, and reset the phone. This helped for about 1 week, then yesterday, the battery drain happened again. As of this morning at 6am, it was fully charged, by 9 am was down to 10%. Prior to updating to 10.5 I was at 50% from 6am - 11:30pm. Now I can't go more then 3 hours . Plus the watch gets very warm. Very frustrating. This feel like the days when being forced into a buying a new device after updates.

I also:

• reset the watch(2nd time doing this)
• turn off photo sync
• turn off recent music
• disable Always On display

Any info/ advice is greaty appreciated.

I think I can no longer even make a full day after this latest update (Watch 8, OS 10.5)

Thanks for the response. I have read and re-read your post. I don't need to do it again. I have not yet unpaired because I only saw the first solution in another thread about the forced restart and it didn't work, so now I did it again and now have to wait 72 hours yet again to see if it works and if not, try unpairing and pairing, but this is still ridiculous to have to jump through all these hoops because of something that was caused by an update when someone could simply fix it and send us another update. And still every day I have to put the watch back on the charger hours before I have ever had to since I have had the watch. Is anyone even looking into this issue to put a fix in place? Thank you!

Do a forced restart of your Apple Watch. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do a forced restart please review the Apple Support article I linked below. After the forced restart the battery usage should return to former levels in 24 to 72 hours. After an update the Watch performs indexing of data in the background and this can consume a lot of battery power.

If high battery usage persists after 72 hours please unpair your Apple Watch and iPhone, restart both devices and then pair them again.

If your Apple Watch is stuck on the Apple logo - Apple Support

Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support

Hi everyone -

Just wanted to update that I did have a chance to follow Jeff’s advice. I forced restarted, waited over 72 hours, and battery continued to drain rapidly. Did a unpair and repair which, like last time, seemed to help for about 24 hours, then my same issues described in my earlier message started up again. I finally reached out to Apple Support since I maintain AppleCare+ on the watch. Surprisingly, they didn’t run any diagnostics when I described my issue. They allowed me to do an express replacement for the watch and that arrived yesterday. I’m now been using the replacement watch for about 24 hours with no issue. I still don’t believe it was a hardware problem, but it does make me wonder if it was a software problem that they are still struggling to find a solution for. I’ll keep you posted if my replacement runs into any issues.

Did the what Jeff Donald recommended above and after unpairing and pairing, it is now retaining the charge like it use to. This has happened to me after the last two updates, so this will be a standard update procedure going forward.

Just saw watch go from 71% to 57% in 1 hour. Nothing running but heart

monitor. About ready to go back to my Garmin. At this rate wont be able to monitor sleep as it will lose charge in 7 hours!! Watch 8. OS 10.5

Hi Jeff - I haven't tried your advice yet, but it seems like people are having good success with it. I've been experiencing the same issue with my Series 7 watch. I was able to have watch fully charged before bedtime and then was typically putting it on the charger around 4PM-5PM the following day. Now, I'm watching the battery life drop dramatically (about 10-12% each hour) and the moment I perform any activity, the battery is draining really fast which is not normal. Before finding this thread, I did unpair and repair my watch. It seemed to be better for about 24 hours but then battery life started dropping again. Maybe I didn't perform the unpairing and pairing properly?

The other issue I'm noticing is that the "find my" features from both the watch and the phone are delayed. It's random. Typically, I could press the button on my watch to find my phone and get the immediate ping on the phone in my house to know where it is. This feature now only works intermittently. Sometimes it's immediate. Sometimes it's delayed by 15-30 seconds. And then sometimes, the phone never pings. The same in reverse from my phone. If I press the button on my phone control center to "find my watch", it might be immediate, delayed, or never happen. This was NEVER the case before. It makes me wonder if there's some issue with the bluetooth connectivity between the watch and the phone? And is that making the battery life on the watch drain faster as maybe it's not connected to the phone properly?

Thanks for your help!

Apple Watch 7..same issues. I’ve done a hard reset on it probably a million times. I’ve unpaired it, paired it back shut phone and watch off then repaired. Unpaired, reset watch to an update that was before 10..Nothing has worked. Any other ideas out there? This was only happening after 10.5 update.