Apple Watch battery drain after watchOS 11 Update

I’ve updated, restarted both watch and iPhone multiple times, turned off live activities, used multiple chargers… still draining at least 2-3x faster than the previous version.

this is a big problem now, I can’t even get a full day with an Apple Watch Ultra 2.. used to get 2.5 days easy

"Unfortunately no press/media sites are writing about this issue :("

No surprise there. It's no wonder most of us have moved on from the legacy Apple product media in 2024. I personally find the majority of them to be a waste of space and not worth my time.

I'm a diabetic and use my Apple Watch Series 9 to directly monitor my Blood Sugar numbers from my Dexcom G7 CGM sensor. I don't have the luxury of being able to "Turn Off" previously used features and settings in order to return what for me is a "medical device" back to it's previously "normal" performance values as a result of a Ham Fisted WatchOS update! 😵‍💫

And according to my most reliable sources like Zollotech and others on YouTube, we won't be seeing the next scheduled iOS/WatchOS update until October 24th and possibly later than that!

And at the end of the day... What is this current battery stress going to do to our Watch battery's long term health? I just noticed that my 1 year old Series 9 has recently dropped to 94% battery health from what had been a solid 100% as recently as last month! 🙄

JC SJ wrote:

Just spent close to an hour troubleshooting with Apple support. No resolution.

Ive had all notifications disabled, no Bluetooth accessories, live activities disabled, always on disabled, and my ultra 2 is dying in under 18 hours with no usage.

Yeah… I opened a ticket with them as well just to get it on the books in the event that my watch battery goes south prematurely then I can point to this 💩show and say "Hey! THIS is why my Series 9 Battery failed early and now I want a new one, on your dime!" 😉

We don't know what this might be doing to the health of our batteries over the long-term! My Series 9 battery health is down to 94% from a previous 98% only a few weeks ago. Coincidence? I seriously don't know. But I'll definitely be keeping my eye on my battery health now more than I would've before.

In terms of my Phone session with Apple SUPPORT, they did run a battery diagnostic on my watch while I was on the phone with them and it all came back normal. Apparently their testing software can't find any specific causes for a battery draining Improperly or not. They can just check to see if it's physically functioning within spec, which apparently mine was at the time.

Retnav46 wrote:

All tips for "saving battery life" are not useful. My watch was fine, prior to watch OS 11.0. Now it's not. I would hope that my series 8 watch is good enough to support updated software.

It's not your fault. It's not any of our faults. Your AW8 is perfectly fine to be running whatever this update is.

Look at all the brand new series 10 and Ultra owners posting on here with the same exact problem. It has nothing to do with the hardware. It has everything to do with Apple totally FUBARing this update, and then hanging us all out to dry while they take their sweet time with getting a much needed update out there ahead of their stupid regular schedule.

I'm pretty sure they're seriously gonna make us wait until October 24 or whenever 18.1 comes out before we see a fix to this.

And that's assuming that they actually fix it in the next update. 🙄

P.S I agree with you 100% that all the battery saving advice is BS in this context. We shouldn't be the ones jumping through hoops to make the watch work normally right now. I'm not gonna do a **** thing to mine. Other than maybe putting it in the drawer until they get this thing fixed.

Well. Has anyone come up with the actual cause yet? My watch usually shuts down in the afternoon now after charging all night. NEVER used to do that before I upgraded the OS’s on the watch and phone. My Apple Watch 8 is about ready to hit the junk pile.

Turning off live activities didn’t seem to help my battery drain since the update but I read on another thread turning off photo syncing under settings/photos might help and it seems to be helping right now. I never look at photos on my watch anyway.

Pretty amazing… I unpaired the watch, reinstalled everything as a “new” watch…‘and it worked flawlessly for about a week. Then one day I took it off the charger at 100%, went for a short run (about 5 miles) and when I got home it was at 60%?!

[Edited by Moderator]

Have a series 6 with great battery life until recently. I thought it was some odd app or something else. Even unpaired and reset and started from scratch but still same issue - a 5-6% discharge per hour overnight!

Until I stumbled upon this discussion. Glad its not just “my issue” but also disappointing to see apple’s QA processes and general quality going down the drain. Battery drain test is one of the most obvious meta QA tests to be conducted for every watch update!

Personnellement je déteste watchos 10 et 11.2 AAPLE remets la personnalisations de nos applications j’en ais marre de votre système bloquer depuis 2023 vos montres pue la demer vous avait toujours pas compris qu’ont veux WatchOS 9 nous !!!

It seems that we’re back at it regarding battery drain. The current OS version 11.1 is failing, and battery life has returned to the same patterns. This is unacceptable. They should have found a lasting solution for this issue way back.

Thank you for the suggestion. I hadn't tried it before, but I just did. The next few hours will reveal how effective it is. However, I have to share some disappointing news: the recurring issue with the Watch OS has become a systemic problem. At this point, Apple seems unwilling to address the issue or find a permanent solution. Additionally, their support platform is failing.

Turning off the Optimized Battery Charging worked for a few

of us with this same issue.

There seems to be a bug in the app for Optimized Battery

Charging.

-        

Turning off Live Activities in the Watch app

under Smart Stack (Did nothing)

-        

Turning off watch and charging overnight (Was a short-lived

fix)

After two weeks of trying different solutions, the only automatic updates disabling on watch and on phone (watch app) + hard restart both fixed the issue. Solution taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrNT6scgAXo

Well well well...

I have been on the RC which is the same build for ‘about’ a week