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The watchOS 10 battery life thread [MERGED]

I've tried everything and nothing works but I noticed something that caught my attention. If you hard reset the watch by pressing the crown and button until the reset, for about 24 hours the watch has excellent battery life, confirmed!. After that time the clock returns to 10%-12% per hour.

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Killerbob said:
My wife’s AW6 is experience this significant drain since updating to 10.1, and is now complaining to me about it. From 100% to 7% in three hours with no usage out of the ordinary. My AWU is fine, as is my daughter’s AW7.
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Mine is an AW6 also and I'm seeing the same, complete drain in about 3 hours. Gonna try deleting apps now and installing 10.2 beta tonight. Looks like the problem is hardware specific, so I may not be able to delay an upgrade after all.
 
scud42 said:
Update for any of you who had battery issues like me stemming from the music app.

The issue turned out not to be the app itself, but specific playlists that were causing my issues. I manually added playlists one by one to my watch. Once I found the offending ones, I removed them, and haven’t had issues since.
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Interesting. This music playlist issue may be an issue I'm having. I've removed all playlists and music from my Watch and it seems that so far, the battery is not draining unreasonably. I'll keep monitoring to see if the battery drain issue continues.
 
Ultra on 10.1. Deleted third party apps, not using weather complications, not using weather widgets, turned off daylight sensor, set weather to local instead of location … nothing helps. Battery life is horrible compared to OS9.

I’m sitting at 81% 14 hours off the charger with 9.5 of those hours having been during sleep with the display off.

I’ve lost about a day’s worth of battery life on OS10 as compared to OS9 with no fix in sight.
 
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Rob9874 said:
Mine is an AW6 also and I'm seeing the same, complete drain in about 3 hours. Gonna try deleting apps now and installing 10.2 beta tonight. Looks like the problem is hardware specific, so I may not be able to delay an upgrade after all.
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I uninstalled most, if not all, 3rd party apps from the AW6, restarted the watch, and then put teh apps back. Now all is good with regards to battery usage, as in 15% used in 5 hours.
 
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szilske said:
Maybe yes and I am the first one who buys new Apple products if there is a good reason. But for AppleWatch there is no such reason, my Series 5 does everything I need well enough. Battery health is at 65% but it was still OK until last week. I wanted to use it until the battery finally dies and then upgrade to AppleWatch Series X next year.
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What life do you get out of yours at 65%?
I am getting 6-7 hours max at 94% indicated, 83% with the Apple Genius.
 
I am hesitant to update after the nightmare from going from watchOS 9 to 10. I had to reset and re-pair to get my normal battery life back.
 
Series Seven, 41mm, aluminum, WiFi only. No third party apps. All widgets canceled. Always in Theater Mode w/haptics for silent notifications.

After 10.1 update, battery life noticeably worse. After 100% charge, it’s down to 85% within hours. Nearly fully drained at end of day. And this is with full Theater Mode, minimal screen use, no calls, no messages.

Prior to 10.1, Apple Watch could run a couple days using this setup. Post 10.1, be lucky to make it one day / 24 hours. And it’s that immediate post-charge rundown, from 100% to ~ 80%, that’s the battery life killer. 100 to 90 percent just disappears, and quickly.

Also: totally fresh install of iOS 17.1 on iPhone 12 mini, followed by fresh 10.1 OS install and new pairing of the Series 7. No incremental updates. Nothing from backup.
 
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Several iOS releases ago (yes iOS, not watchOS), the update made the battery health of my iPhone 12 Pro drop several percentages in the course of couple of weeks. I think it went from like 95 to 88 or something drastic like that. After a certain update, that drastic drop stopped. I have no idea what happened but I hope that or a similar issue isn't going to reduce the battery health of my Watch Ultra. Currently it's at 100%.

Edit: I should add that when my iPhone 12 Pro went from 95 to 88% battery health, it did not recover to a higher number once the dramatic drop stopped. It was disappointing. I think the software did shorten the life of my battery.
 
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I've got AWU2 with 15 PM on 10.1 and iOS 17.1 with no issues. I have a bunch of complications, stored music and such on my watch. My wife has AWU1 with 15 PM on 10.1 and iOS 17.1 with no complications or stored music has less than 8 hours of battery on her watch. Hard reset does nothing for her watch
 
Been a couple of days and my S6 watch battery seems "normal" - I no longer end the day at 20% but at 40-50% which is absolutely fine with me.

Will continue to monitor and update you guys though!
 
Apple Watch 9, 48 hours was at 30%. Decent use, gym, calls, texts and numerous reminders. Running 10.0.2.
 
Canyda said:
My wife updated her iPhone XR to 17.1 yesterday but left her Watch on 9 and lost 50% of her battery overnight, which has never happened before.
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After seeing two nights of 50% battery discharge overnight (yet no excess discharge during the day) my wife's SE only discharged to 84% overnight from fully charged, so we seem to be over the hump on this.
 
Canyda said:
After seeing two nights of 50% battery discharge overnight (yet no excess discharge during the day) my wife's SE only discharged to 84% overnight from fully charged, so we seem to be over the hump on this.
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Interesting. So possible that the Watch is doing something in the background?

What worries me most if if this kind of activity lowers the Watch's battery health unnecessarily.
 
msackey said:
Interesting. So possible that the Watch is doing something in the background?

What worries me most if if this kind of activity lowers the Watch's battery health unnecessarily.
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I’ll save you the suspense; it does lower battery health. My practically new S8 went from 99/98 to 95 battery health with this update.
 
msackey said:
Interesting. So possible that the Watch is doing something in the background?

What worries me most if if this kind of activity lowers the Watch's battery health unnecessarily.
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There's lots about my wife's specific case I just don't understand, notably:

* How/why/what's the mechanism by which an iOS update on a phone so dramatically affects how the battery acts on the Watch?
* Why was the excess discharge ONLY happening at night and not during the day?
 
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Canyda said:
There's lots about my wife's specific case I just don't understand, notably:

* How/why/what's the mechanism by which an iOS update on a phone so dramatically affects how the battery acts on the Watch?
* Why was the excess discharge ONLY happening at night and not during the day?
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Indeed. I find it absolutely NOT acceptable that an update to a public released non-beta operating system can damage a device's battery health. Happened to my iPhone! Not acceptable.
 
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After uninstalling third party apps I seem to still have drain so I unpaired and set up my Watch as new. I never had MobyFace so that wasn’t the issue.

Let’s see how this new setup works…
 
Well... I'm on 10.2 Beta 1 and still have the same battery issues... :(
After reporting the bug multiple times to Apple (through the feedback app) they finally responded and requested additional information. I had to install a profile to run a sys diagnosis and upload the file.

I looked though the files by myself and you can clearly see the battery drain. I hope Apple can fix the issues.

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Debauch said:
Ultra on 10.1. Deleted third party apps, not using weather complications, not using weather widgets, turned off daylight sensor, set weather to local instead of location … nothing helps. Battery life is horrible compared to OS9.

I’m sitting at 81% 14 hours off the charger with 9.5 of those hours having been during sleep with the display off.

I’ve lost about a day’s worth of battery life on OS10 as compared to OS9 with no fix in sight.
Click to expand...

My Ultra 1 went back to almost normal, when I deleted my offline playlists in Apple Music. No idea why that would help out anything, but back to two-day battery life.
 
xDKP said:
My Ultra 1 went back to almost normal, when I deleted my offline playlists in Apple Music. No idea why that would help out anything, but back to two-day battery life.
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Do you keep podcasts on your watch? If so, did you need to making any changes there to deal with battery life?
 
Wonder when watchOS 10.2 will be out. Hope it fixes the battery issues and hope out out soon. I worry about the battery health
 
msackey said:
Wonder when watchOS 10.2 will be out. Hope it fixes the battery issues and hope out out soon. I worry about the battery health
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It doesn’t. Im on 10.2 Apple Watch Ultra 1st gen and and I took it off the charger at 10:30am yesterday and I went Down to 22% today at 9:10am. I work from home so didn’t do anything that would use a lot of power and I don’t have always on - on. I can normally go 2-3 days before charging it
 
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