Apple Watch eats iPhone 6's battery

I've read elsewhere about the 6+'s battery life dropping to less then a day.

The steps you are planning to do sound sensible. Apart from logging out of iCloud I've done all of them my end as well.

Getting rid of the non-native apps at first looked like it did the trick, the watch seemed subjectively more responsive, but it didn't really solve my battery drain issue. 1 hour 45 min after the re-pairing w/o any synced non-native apps both devices had lost another 30% of battery life, so slightly better than before, but nowhere near normal. Having neither my watch nor my iPhone last beyond lunchtime from fully charged at 7am is a bit embarrassing and I'm sure I won't hear the end of it from my non-Apple colleagues...

ah, sorry, I didn't mean to say logging out of iCloud won't work, I meant I've not tried it.

Backing up my iPhone now and going to wipe it soon. If that doesn't work it's off to the Genius Bar...

so, I've reset my iPhone and set it up as a new device (not restoring from backup), hoping to eliminate all possible side effects caused on the iPhone side of things.

When pairing the watch to the phone I only installed native apps, no 3rd party, but left all other settings in default.

I wasn't even too worried about the fact that the iPhone went down from fully charged to 62% and the Apple Watch to 56% within 2 hours as I gave them credit for having to sync the apps first and I assumed this would consume a lot of energy with Bluetooth transferring large amounts of data.

Being the irrepressible optimist that I am, I even didn't frown upon the calendar app seemingly taking forever to launch on the watch without showing any result and ultimately crashing (after taking so long to start that the screen saver would kick in several times), because I thought it might have to cache my (admittedly large amount of) calendar entries.

But when I started using the watch in the morning, my optimism was quickly shattered. Here are my stats so far:

• 05:50am: iPhone 100%, Apple Watch 100%

  activities: 35 minutes of excercise using the workout app on the watch and podcast on the iPhone

• 08:00am: iPhone 52%, Apple Watch 58%
  • force quit the Apple Watch app on the iPhone
  • Charged the iPhone for 30 mins through the USB socket in the car while driving into work
  • activities: none on the Apple Watch, Podcast on the iPhone
• 08:30am: iPhone 43% (despite charging!), Apple Watch 46%

  activities: none

• 09:30am: iPhone 31% Apple Watch 28%

  activities: none on the APple Watch, BA app on the iPhone

• 10:00am iPhone 11%, Apple Watch 19%

so I'm going to put both devices on charge and I'm not even in the office for more than 1.5 hours...

I guess I'll book an appointment at the Genius bar now (maybe phone support first)...

So, I just got off the phone with Apple Support and they basically asked me to go through all the tings I had already done

• un-paring and re-paring the watch
• leaving all third party apps off for the time being
• re-setting the iPhone (as in setting up as new iPhone, not restoring from backup)
• checking battery consumption per app on the iPhone (Settings>Usage>Battery Usage), which did not show any obvious battery hogs. I've read elsewhere that some users had the Apple Watch app use disproportionate amounts of battery life, so force quitting it solved it for them. Doesn't seem to be the root cause in my case:

So we agreed that something seems to be fundamentally wrong with - most likely the Apple Watch as the phone behaves normally when the watch is not paired.

So I've booked an appointment at my local Apple Store on Friday and we'll see how it goes...

In the meantime I'll do some battery life tests with Bluetooth switched off on the iPhone and the Apple Watch in Airplane mode hoping to confirm my assumption that the problem is entirely Bluetooth related.

Update:

After a long but unsuccessful visit to the Apple Store (the Genius agreed with me that something was fundamentally wrong with my Watch, but they don't have any replacement stock, so the Watch would have to be returned via the online store - something I could have initiated from the comfort of my home, sparing me the 1.5hrs drive to the store...), I decided to look into some of the other odd bahaviours my Watch had shown, which I had so far put down to being side effects of the main problem which I suspected to be a defect on the Bluetooth Side.

I've consistently had issues getting the watch unlocked. Sometimes it would take me an hour of restarting either device until finally the blue padlock symbol would disappear.

So when I found this thread Problem Setting Passcode on Apple Watch, I thought why not give it a try with a factory reset iPhone without the profiles for my corporate exchange server and security policy installed and hey presto - that solved it!

I've been using the watch all day and it behaves perfectly normal. It's responsive and most of all the battery is still at 78% after almost 6 hours of use! Yay!

So I'll be very brave now and install the corporate profiles, as one of the other threads seemed to imply that the passcode would work as long as it is set up before the profiles are installed. Let's see...

Unfortunately as soon as I had installed my corporate security profiles, the old behaviour started again - unlocking takes countless attempts, apps load and operate sluggishly and the battery drains like there is no tomorrow.

Oh well, here's hoping that the next Watch OS and iOS updates will fix this.