Apple Suggests Restoring iPhone and Apple Watch to Fix Excess Battery Drain or Missing GPS Data

[otternonsense]

WTF! This is such a non-Apple type of recommendation. Smells like feedback coming from MS back in the days.

Actually that's exactly the Apple kind of recommendation. Whenever I've had such an issue (e.g. with battery) and contacted Apple Support chat, that's the same thing they'd tell me, to restore and hope for the best.

But the thing is, in my case, I've already done a clean install of iOS 14 on my 11 Pro and battery is a potato. So what then??

 

[koil]

It just works.

My S4:s heart rate sensor stopped working with WatchOS 7, reset the watch, now "It just works." again!

 

[xxray]

Woooo. I have both battery drain and missing GPS data, so now I have to go through this process to fix it. Can’t wait to spend hours downloading my iCloud backup and Spotify library. 🙂

 

[tobybrut]

I have to attest that re-doing the Apple Watch does make a difference. I had to restore my Apple Watch because I was downgrading from iOS 14.2 beta 1 back to 14.0 and it has given me rather amazing battery life on my Apple Watch. I haven’t tested my iPhone because it rarely goes below 90% when we’re still in lockdown, but in a 14-hour day, my Apple Watch almost always has between 60-65% battery left over. It could easily go two days without a charge. In similar use, my Apple Watch 5 would finish the day with 40-50% battery left.

 

[Unsupported]

I don't have an Apple Watch, but my iPhone's battery does seem to require charging more often since iOS 14.

Should I follow Apple's suggestion to restore, or should I wait for iOS 14.2?

 

[HMFIC03]

This solution brought back the 4 years of missing health data which I’m delighted about. It also appears to have resolved my problem where the watch wasn’t sending data back to the phone randomly, it would look like I had the watch off random hours during the day.

This solution HAS NOT restored the GPS routes from previous workouts. All only show starting point.

same here

 

[mnsportsgeek]

Wow. Another great update season, Apple.

 

[nt5672]

I wonder how often I should do this -

1. unpaired an AW3, restored to new AW6 on launch day,
2. repaired the AW6 when workouts wouldn’t show up at all,
3. ended up setting up the AW6 as new watch when workouts still wouldn’t show up.

I still have gaps in heart rate monitoring, inconsistent information in the workout/fitness between watch and phone, and only the starting point for workouts. So now I need to restore the phone? Wow. This is first in over a decade with an iPhone.

Welcome to the new Apple. The good news is that the Keynote was fantastic and the devices were delivered on time.

 

[KB13]

This is not a solution. Is is only a very complicated and unnecessary fix, which a geek might be able to manage easily, yet most of us haven't got the time or the inclination to go through such a ridiculous process.
Apple should be looking for a "fix" that should be automatically available with the next software update.
After all these are consumer products. Please be considerate to your customers.

 

[matthewadams]

I ran through these steps.
All workouts are recovered, except for those that never synced in the first place.
All Maps are lost (incl. from previous runs in iOS 13).
New Maps work though and HR does as well.

Battery drain and heat disappeared and there is no longer a message about corrupted healthkit databases in the console log for the iphone.

Restoring through iTunes definitely does not work, it has to be iCloud :/

 

[Kid Red]

I haven't worn my watch much, but I've certainly noticed abnormally quick battery drain on my iPhone.

 

[Henk Poley]

Restoring through iTunes definitely does not work, it has to be iCloud :/

In what way does it not work?

iTunes, so Windows or old macOS (not Catalina, Big Sur) ?

 

[steevn]

I’d hardly say 5 years and over 6 iterations is new technology. They seem pretty refined to me, much like the iPhone and the iPad.

That’s why I put new in quotations. It’s not that new of technology, but it is their newest and if they don’t really have a better fix, and can’t control basically the same issues from update to update, they still have a lot to learn about these watches.

 

[Macyourdayy]

This is horrible. Most people won't know how to do this or read Macrumors to find out to do this. They'll just notice the excessive battery drain and be unhappy about it. :/ Makes one wonder if an update wouldn't fix this because they put the time into suggesting people unpair/pair.

I've done this several times with my AW3 and AW5 and it does seem to help when I've had problems in the past.

Maybe the watches are actually running Windows mobile, what with the wiping, restoring, etc.
When a genius’s first step is to reset, restore and often just dump your data, I just want to punch them in the face, or at least wipe all their devices.

 

[imola.zhp]

I've done it twice now, watch only, its so bizarre.

One night the battery drained while sleeping, went to bed with 80+% at 10'ish. Got up around 3am to use the restroom (thank you late 30's bladder) and it was dead as a door nail.

That was last week, I think, yesterday after a 12 hour day I was still at 70%. Hopefully I'm good to go, AW4 LTE, a few months shy of 2 years old. For the past 22 months I only charge while getting ready for work, 45-90 minutes. Once per week, give or take, have to charge overnight. Today I've had it on for almost 2 hours and still show 99% which also doesn't seem right.

 

[Macyourdayy]

So each time I restore my phone I need to re-enroll in my office BYOD program that goes trou multiple approvals. So its utterly idiotic of Apple to give this as a solution.

It’s their go to “solution”. It really screws your iCloud backup and mostly doesn’t fix flaky wireless or gps issues.

 

[BenLeong]

I was waiting to get a Series 6 until after I saw how people were liking them. Glad I didn’t pull the trigger.

Is it just Series 6? Is it the Watch OS? Is it iOS 14? Or is it a combination of those?

 

[Macyourdayy]

All Apple services run on 100% clean energy

That’s because you have to wipe everything.

 

[atmenterprises]

WTF! This is such a non-Apple type of recommendation. Smells like feedback coming from MS back in the days.

"You're updating it wrong."

 

[JForestZ34]

I remember back when Apple would release an iOS and it didn’t have nearly as many problems as it does today. Now we all know the mess with Maps when we upgraded to a new iOS. And I know that was under forstall but when he was in charge of the OS things were a lot better when it was released than they are now

James

 

[etphone]

Tried it. It sort of worked. Missing workouts showed up, then they disappeared as the restore continued.

 

[selaing]

I am only seeing the battery drain on my AW3. Used to get a full day on battery, now down to 30% after 8 hours. Doing nothing except moved to OS7.
Should I unpair the watch from the phone? Or should I following this process for everything?

 

[Zanton68]

Are they kidding ? They’re kidding right ? Surely they mean “We acknowledge this bug in our software and working quickly to release a software update to fix this” but posted the other page by mistake ?

 

[Rogifan]

Just tried unpairing and re-pairing aaaaaaaand there's no watch backup. This is just swell.

You unpaired your Watch from your iPhone and when you went to re-pair it no backup was there? Oh man that sucks. The whole Watch backup/restore process is terrible.

I've just followed the instructions to backup, erase and restore everything, and now I'm missing all my activity data since 19th September – presumably that's when I updated to watchOS 7?

I’ve found that sometimes the activity data takes a while to come back. If you don’t see it after a couple hours though then I think it’s lost. You for sure have Health checked green in the iCloud settings?

 

[gmanist1000]

Yeah I’m missing the GPS workout maps, but I’m not doing any of these steps. Apple needs to send a software update to fix this, I’m not going through those steps.