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Apple Watch battery draining fast after watchOS 11 Update

Finding very heavy battery drain with this update. From 9am to 10am lost 10% battery. Usually at 7pm I would have 65-70% battery left. Sitting at 50% right now.



[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Apple Watch Series 7, watchOS 11

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 3:58 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Sep 19, 2024 5:32 AM

to apple watch teams


Terrible battery drain after updating watchOS 11 on apple watch series 7. The apple watch goes from 100% to 84% in less than 1 hours. In 8 hours, the apple watch is running out of charge.  Worst of all, this is using it as normal watch, not playing music, not tracking any sports or activity from workout app, just putting in my wrist to use it as a normal watch.

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Oct 12, 2024 9:08 AM in response to maximillian100

Try to unpair and pair it again.

My battery life on the Ultra 2 is back to were it was in watchOS 10.6.1.

After 67hours still 19%, every day at least 30min workout, Live Activities switched off, Always On Display disabled. Tracking sleep uses less or around 1% per hour.

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Oct 12, 2024 10:27 AM in response to d_b101

Exactly. I’ve tried everything. Even unpaired twice. Zero improvement. I used to be able to do 3-4 walking exercises for 30-60 mins at a time and still wake up with 35-40% battery. The other day I wanted to see how far I could take it without charging twice in a day. I woke up with 5% battery. Battery health on the Watch is 87%. Other complaint I have are the updates to Timers and Weather apps also stink. They went backwards on the update and did not improve it.

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Oct 13, 2024 6:04 PM in response to Chort26

So I have been working with Apple directly about the battery draining issue along with a backup issue. The backup issue is that the watches have not been backing up since the beginning of iOS 17. Appears that when you go to settings>iphone storage> and look for the watch app, your backup are showing old ones and not updated backups. This has been reported to an engineer at Apple now. However still leaves the battery draining issue. I finally unpaired 4 of my Apple Watches series 6,7,10, and ultra. All have returned to normal battery cycles. However, the olds of you getting a recent backup may be low per everyone reading this. After unpairing and setting up the watch again backups and battery cycles return to normal. Not for sure if the issue has to do with multiple watches connected to a device which I have 5 which is the max per device. Either way this a bad bug!!! Not for sure if this will ever get resolved. After reading several bugs, the battery draining issue has been present since July and 1st of August in the betas and never got fixed.


in conclusion my recommendation for everyone have issues with the battery is to unpair the (I) set it up as a new watch, but the restore from backup should work too. Hope this helps everyone!!! Good Day Mate!!!

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Oct 15, 2024 12:27 PM in response to The_Apple_User_1984

Mine lasts for 6 hours. I already tried a watch and phone reset multiple times. In addition, the battery health dropped from 100 to 83% during this time. This means that I will need to replace my battery once it reaches 80% if Apple doesn’t address this issue.


Today, my watch also wouldn’t stop beeping, asking me to power it off, contact emergency services (SOS) or cancel. I would cancel or power it off, and it just keeps alerting me with the same prompt.


I did a phone reset and it happened again during the reset. I had to keep trying to reset it in-between the erroneous alerts. I have yet to see if this reset fixed anything.

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Oct 23, 2024 12:55 PM in response to Chort26

With the last update, now my watch battery lasts another hour (7 hours instead of 6). Also, my watch no longer gets severely hot like it has been whenever I charge it since the OS 11 update.


Since the 11 update, I also cannot change the brightness on my watch. I move the slider and it has no effect. My display also periodically twitches, so I have trouble changing any alarms.


I turned off most of my notifications. (Already tried all resets.)

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Oct 30, 2024 10:13 AM in response to maylandly

Maylandy, yours was a helpful comment. Unfortunately I've reached my "likes" limit (what???) In any case, this whole thread is borderline scary. I have a 6; my wife a 5. I've been suggesting she upgrade to a 10, but now I wonder. The 5 will not update beyond ios 10.x, so that one has no battery problem even though its older than mine.

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Oct 31, 2024 3:47 AM in response to Chort26

Hi guys,


Same here. My Watch 7 CE is draining super fast after upgrading to iOS 18 (even 18.1). Wrist detection is also completely off and keeps locking every time so I had to disable it.


Of course month after warranty.... Sweet.


Restarts / reattaching did not solve the issue. Disabling Live activities or picture sync neither.


What now?

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Oct 31, 2024 4:37 AM in response to Chort26

Leave it finish its updates which seem to progress long after they look like they’re finished. Mine took the whole day and ran my ultra to 5% in 6 hours. Back to normal today - I hope! Not sure why Apple don’t declare this as part of their upgrade process.

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Nov 2, 2024 8:33 AM in response to Kristof1281

It looks like you need to keep your 10.nn if possible, until the final 11.nn bugs are out. It does appear that my series 6 is slightly better with 11.1 than it was with 11.01. My wife's series 5--which actually is displaying an end-of-life warning under battery health--is lasting longer than my series 6. Hers shows capacity down to 77% from new; mine is 93% from new. The series 5 apparently is not compatible with the iOS 11.nn versions.


Timing is everything. I had almost convinced her to trade up to a series 10.

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Nov 2, 2024 9:50 AM in response to Ingo2711

Two days ago I installed the latest watchOS 11.1 update and the battery life on my Ultra 2 remained stable.

Unpairing and re-pairing, water watchOS 11.0.1 restored the battery life to normal and the latest watchOS update did not change that. 45hours without charging, 44% battery life left, average use 1.2% per hour, 60min recorded workouts.

Live Activities are still disabled.


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Nov 5, 2024 5:02 AM in response to moonstruck58

Wife S5; me S6 (wife got me one because she liked hers...ordinarily, I have the older version of any tech in the house.) Anyway, the S5 won't update beyond iOS 10.nn, and she has no problem with it running down rapidly. My S6 suffered the 11.0 and 11.01 rapid battery drain. It seems to be doing better a couple days after 11.1 was installed. I shut down and restarted a couple times. I leave it on a charger overnight, and it charges to 80%, as that's the new system, I'm told, to maximize battery life. Yesterday, it was still at 44% at 11pm, so it's doing much better. Fingers crossed.

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Nov 5, 2024 2:00 PM in response to Chort26

Same problem here. It’s not to do with age of the watch though as mine is series 9 and was perfect before this update. Now I put it on the charger and it’s draining as fast as it’s charging! The charge percentage sometimes goes down when the watch is on the charger. I found if I turned the watch and the phone off and on again it seems to resolve for the day… but happens again the next day. Very odd!

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Apple Watch battery draining fast after watchOS 11 Update

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