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The watchOS 10 battery life thread [MERGED]

So I haven’t had any battery issues that I’m aware of and after I upgraded my ultra 2 to 10.0.2, I then powered it down as I tend not to wear a watch at home. The next day I powered it up charged it up to 100% and went out for the evening. Within half an hour it dropped 2% and I was absolutely shocked but then it seemed to settle down and I only lost another 9% in the next eight hours and that was with light use just checking notifications and messages. So pretty much on par with my ultra 1. I also have widgets loaded and I have Weather set to current location and I’m not having any issues with that since re-syncing. Wearing it for six hours today, I’ve only lost another 8% again with very little usage. I will keep an eye on it though because obviously with so many people having issues around battery and the weather app there are obviously problems with Watch OS10.
 
I have a couple Apple Watches with which I am using WatchOS 10. The series 5 is really having battery issues. I keep having problems with anything weather related. On any watch face I use that has a weather complication, the information is always in metric no matter what I do to try to change it. If I open the weather app itself it will be in fahrenheit but the complication is still in metric. I've changed and tried to reset every setting related to it there is available. Nothing will fix it. Obviously battery drain is higher than usual.

On a positive note my podcasts, which have been broken for years, appear fixed.

On a negative note, as others have mentioned, you can't even tell what is local or cloud anymore so you're not certain if you are heading out for a run with something you can actually listen to without WIFI or your phone with you.
 
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I removed weather complications and widgets as others suggested. Also set weather to my city instead of location. That has helped with battery drain.

Crazy that the Ultra 2 seems unaffected but the Ultra is taking a beating.
 
Two hours into this morning and down to 88% already (on S7 that will normally get me 14 hr day with 2 hr workout and have 30% remaining). I deleted all widgets just now and will see if that helps.
 
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For what it's worth I've encountered some jank with since the final update but I think I have in under control now. I've lost about 14% of my battery since 10AM and it's 2PM now, which seems on track with how watchOS9 was. Haven't been doing any exercise or intensive tasks with it. I have a first gen SE, with battery health listing capacity at 89%.

For a couple days the battery was draining REALLY quickly, less than 6 hours of use from full to dead unresponsive. I factory reset the watch, and then hard rebooted it, and now it's performing more or less as before.

The odd part of all this is I was running the beta of watchOS 10 since it dropped months ago, and aside from some hesitation/lag it was behaving itself well, no weird battery drain. So I'm hopeful the full on reset will fix it. I've noticed that my phone and iPad also benefitted from a factory reset after being updated to iOS/iPadOS 17, it just seems to get rid of a lot of the beta system data cruft and eliminated any hesitations or remaining weird behaviour. This is just my anecdotal observations though.
 
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I too had battery drain issues with 10.0 and 10.0.1. Then battery drain issue disappeared when I changed the weather app Default City from Current Location to an actual city. It’s possible battery drain was caused watch by a bug in iOS 10 trying to find current location.
 
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I used to get 2 days out of ultra 1 with watch os 9 but with 10 it has gone down to 1.5 days. I take it to gym with no phone so each day it is on cellular for 2 hours at least.
I think the weather app was the culprit. After resetting the location and privacy settings in iPhone, the battery in the watch seems to be improved. Have to test for another 4 days to really know if I am back to getting 2 days out of the ultra
 
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mmacrumor said:
I used to get 2 days out of ultra 1 with watch os 9 but with 10 it has gone down to 1.5 days. I take it to gym with no phone so each day it is on cellular for 2 hours at least.
I think the weather app was the culprit. After resetting the location and privacy settings in iPhone, the battery in the watch seems to be improved. Have to test for another 4 days to really know if I am back to getting 2 days out of the ultra
Click to expand...

I've gone into the Watch app and set the weather location to Victoria and turned off "My Location" and we'll see if that helps.

liteshow said:
I too had battery drain issues with 10.0 and 10.0.1. Then battery drain issue disappeared when I changed the weather app Default City from Current Location to an actual city. It’s possible battery drain was caused watch by a bug in iOS 10 trying to find current location.
Click to expand...

Will monitor and see if this improves things, hadn't thought to change that. I'm kind of surprised there isn't a setting for "mirror phone" in terms of the location so that instead of wasting cycles pulling data to update location it can just pull the data from the already fetched data on the phone. Or maybe it already does that? Strange though. I would like it to update with my current location but not if it's going to drain the battery that hard.
 
Series 7 with 85% battery health. My battery also has been draining faster with watchOS 10. I had it just about fully charged before bed last night, but when I woke up, it was down to around 50%. I turned off a bunch of apps refreshing in the background. Hope that helps until a fix comes along.
 
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mfm77 said:
Series 7 with 85% battery health. My battery also has been draining faster with watchOS 10. I had it just about fully charged before bed last night, but when I woke up, it was down to around 50%. I turned off a bunch of apps refreshing in the background. Hope that helps until a fix comes along.
Click to expand...
That is a lot overnight 😳. My AW6 used to loose 8-10% overnight. Not tried since OS10 as I need to charge it now
 
Can you guys check if the "Find my" app / network is working properly for you? I noticed a strange behaviour where the "last seen" tag is very inaccurate on my iPhone and shows a different time stamp in my watch. Maybe the "Find my" network also has a problem is is the cause of the battery drain?
 
realphilan said:
Can you guys check if the "Find my" app / network is working properly for you? I noticed a strange behaviour where the "last seen" tag is very inaccurate on my iPhone and shows a different time stamp in my watch. Maybe the "Find my" network also has a problem is is the cause of the battery drain?
Click to expand...
My "Find my" finds my iPhone, iPad and Mack fine with watch os 10.0.1

I upgraded my new Walmart $129 special SE gen 1 from watchOS 9.6.1 to 10.01 yesterday morning. Was getting pretty much all day (7am-11pm) with a 1 hour workout before I had to charge at 20% on os 9.6. That's about a 5% average drain per hour on a relatively new install of 9.6. Have only had the watch a week, so not sure it had time to settle down fully from its initial upgrade from os 8 to 9.6 after I bought it. Battery heath is 100%, since its a new watch.

1 day after the upgrade to 10.01 now, battery drain was atrocious the first few hours yesterday, but has settled down. I was doing a lot of fiddling with it and the apps getting it set up, so I put it on the charger a few times.

Took it off the charger at 100% at 9 am this morning and went on a 14 mile bike ride (with a few stops) using the cycle app trying to stay in Zone 2 with audio prompts from the watch and listening to music downloaded to the watch BT'd to my PowerBeats the whole way. Ride took an hour and 20 minutes total, but paused the cycle app but not the music when stopped. About half the music was downloaded to the watch, the other half streamed from the iPhone. Its now 3 pm and I am down to 54%. So with a heavy workout and music have drained it about 7.7% /hour average so far today. I'll see how long it goes into the evening.

(Midnight Edit - put the SE on the charger at midnight. It was sitting right on 20%. So, got 15 hours for the day. Hopefully will improve a smidge more, but I can live with that, since I don’t plan on sleeping with it on).
 
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U2, coming from Garmin 965, battery is much worse obviously but better than expected. Charged to 100% at 11pm on Thursday, was at 30% when woke up today (Sunday). Default settings, default watch face, only changes from default: always on display OFF, AFib History on as I want as frequent as possible HRV measurements. Wearing the watch 24h, had two, 40 mins long GPS workouts in the process as well.
 
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I’ve been quite disappointed with battery life since the update. However, I seem to have found which app for me is the culprit.

I do not have Apple Music, and instead rely on the old school music sync through iTunes. I have over 6k songs, however obviously I do not need that much on my watch. I had a Smart Playlist on my phone that was basically top 1000 most played songs. In my watch Music app settings, this is what I selected as the only music I wanted synced to my watch. This has worked fine since I got my series 8.

After I upgraded my watch to WatchOS 10 I noticed I was getting a third of the battery life I used to get. Like in 10 hours I would go from 100->10% without using the watch at all. No fitness, music, nothing.

Well digging around trying to troubleshoot, I looked in my watch settings -> general -> about. It showed my watch as having over 3k songs on it. Now mind you nothing changed in my music settings. The ONLY playlist I was syncing was 1000 songs long, and Recent Music was disabled. I also noticed that that song number would sometimes go up or down depending on when I opened the About menu. Something was definitely wrong there.

I reset my watch from scratch (no backup) and reset everything back to where it was. Seemed to work fine for 24 hours, however shortly, I’d see the battery issues return.

I tried syncing different playlists, loading less music onto my phone, etc. I verified that the playlist was fully synced while it was on the charger (according to the Settings -> Music) to make sure it wasn’t needing to sync in the background. I even disabled Music background activity. Setting it up multiple times as new didn’t work either. Every time I’d load songs onto my phone my watch would start to poorly perform.

The only thing that has worked so far is to remove the Music app from my phone (since you can’t keep it uninstalled from the watch separately)

While this seems extreme, I give you the below screenshots from my watch battery timeline. The first shows how bad this was. Every day the drain would be horrible. The second shows what it looked like after deleting Music. You can totally see the inflection change. (The screenshots overlap a bit in time) Ever since I’ve deleted music, no more battery problems.

I’m sure there’s some stuck music service that’s doing this, but there’s nothing I can tell that I’m able to do to stop it.
 

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Ok guys, maybe some good news for all affected from the battery drain: after installing watchOS 10.1 Beta 1 the battery stayed worse. But as a lot of you already suspected, it maybe is a combination of several problems /or in the communications between iOS 17 and watchOS.
That’s why I installed iOS 17.1 Beta 1 on my iPhone to see what happens. Surprisingly I had today the best day since upgrading to watchOS 10.X. It seems that a combination of both .1 releases kinda fixes the issues!
 
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My S5 returned to something approaching normal today after several days of poor battery following 10.1 beta install. Hard to know what changed to make it behave unfortunately.
 
I am now back to normal on my S6 with 84% battery life. But, I’m still troubleshooting. Details below.

I’ve ruled out the following;

Carrot weather. Can have it installed and as a complication and it doesn’t reduce life.

Background app refresh. Turning this off did not increase battery life one bit. In fact. On days where it was off the usage was higher.

My current state;

Watch face remains modular with carrot weather. Simple for now.

Weather location is set to never and background app refresh for this is off. I will turn each setting on by one at a later date.

Widgets were all removed. I will add them back for tomorrows test.
 
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Happy to report my SE 1st generation seems mostly back to normal on watchOS 10.0.1. I haven't removed any apps and battery health is 100. Watch is in silent mode, but I still get haptic feedback on new emails and when timers go off (I use the timers almost everyday for cooking). I also still get the verbal messages on heart rate zones etc. when I do my bike workouts. I removed my watch from the charger this morning at 7:23. Did one hour walk workout listening to music with my PowerBeats from the watch. Its now 8:30 pm and I am still at 50%. iOS 17.0.2 on my phone
 
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Total disaster over here. I always charge the Watch (SE1) to 100% before I go to bed. When I wake up in the morning it’s always around 90% (airplane mode on during the night).

Since updating to WatchOS/iOS 10, in the morning I only have 15-30% (!!!) to start the day. This is crazy. Also when recharging to 100% in the morning, it only lasts +- 8 hours, with almost no use at all.
 
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smyrna5 said:
Happy to report my SE 1st generation seems mostly back to normal on watchOS 10.0.1. I haven't removed any apps and battery health is 100. Watch is in silent mode, but I still get haptic feedback on new emails and when timers go off (I use the timers almost everyday for cooking). I also still get the verbal messages on heart rate zones etc. when I do my bike workouts. I removed my watch from the charger this morning at 7:23. Did one hour walk workout listening to music with my PowerBeats from the watch. Its now 8:30 pm and I am still at 50%. iOS 17.0.2 on my phone
Click to expand...
How long did it take for your Watch until everything was ‘normal’ again? Tomorrow will be a week since updating for me (also SE1).
 
Major Foster said:
How long did it take for your Watch until everything was ‘normal’ again? Tomorrow will be a week since updating for me (also SE1).
Click to expand...
I want to know that too ... Series 7 here. OTOH , , optimised battery charging has not kicked in since the update .
 
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