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Watch causing drain on phone battery

E

Eduardboon

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 17, 2012
269
39
Hi all,

I am currently using a first generation watch in combination with an iPhone 5C. I have had this problem with the iPhone 6 and 7 as well.

The watch seems to drain the phones battery. I have restored the phone as new from DFU and also paired the watch as a new watch.

The only thing peculiar is that the "Now playing" complication keeps re-appearing in the dock, even after I force quit it. It only wants to dissapear when I break the connection with the phone. Is there someone here that has encountered the same problem and is able to help me? It is as if the phone is constantly pushing some kind of music connection to the watch, but I don't have any apps opened up at all.
[doublepost=1475012452][/doublepost]Almost forgot:

When I disable bluetooth on the phone, the drain continues; airplane mode seems to stop the drain. If I want to get rid of the drain I have to unpair my watch completely; I can then enable bluetooth all day long with better battery life (just 1,20 hours of usage on 5 hours of standby instead of 3 hours usage on 5 hours of standby).
 
I have the same problem with the AW2 I just bought. My battery drained only down to 70% (30% use) after 15 hours of heavy messaging for the first few days. All of a sudden it drains to 30% (70% use) after 15 hrs & when I have long travel days from EST to PST, my AW2 may not make a full day. Someone on the forum said clearing the dock doesn't do much, but I have u paired and so on, it can't get it back to the way it was during the first few days. I found I have to power the AW2 off as back on to clear the dock so the "Now Playing" is removed (not that I even know why it keeps appearing in the dock) as I've never tried to play music on my AW2
 
SUMIMASN said:
I have the same problem with the AW2 I just bought. My battery drained only down to 70% (30% use) after 15 hours of heavy messaging for the first few days. All of a sudden it drains to 30% (70% use) after 15 hrs & when I have long travel days from EST to PST, my AW2 may not make a full day. Someone on the forum said clearing the dock doesn't do much, but I have u paired and so on, it can't get it back to the way it was during the first few days. I found I have to power the AW2 off as back on to clear the dock so the "Now Playing" is removed (not that I even know why it keeps appearing in the dock) as I've never tried to play music on my AW2
Click to expand...

Rebooting or hard rebooting the watch doesn't make a difference here; it keeps reappearing.

This night the phone had 40 minutes of usage and lost 6 percent of battery while the watch lost 20 percent. No messages came through, nothing happened. It's just so annoying to not be able to pair the watch if I want to make it through the day.
 
Macaddict16 said:
Hmmm. Do you have music on your Apple Watch? I had a huge battery issue and that ended up being the culprit, but mine said App Store was the issue.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/app-store-massive-battery-drain.2001418/
Click to expand...
I only have stock apps on the watch, background refresh turned off.

I have just called Applecare and am in touch with a senior advisor. He suspects that there might be something wrong with my apple id / icloud account. I am now testing the watch on someone else's phone with someone else's apple account to see if the same thing happens there. If it does, I'll get a new watch, if it doesn't; They want access to my iCloud account to see if they can reproduce the problem and fix it.
 
Eduardboon said:
I only have stock apps on the watch, background refresh turned off.

I have just called Applecare and am in touch with a senior advisor. He suspects that there might be something wrong with my apple id / icloud account. I am now testing the watch on someone else's phone with someone else's apple account to see if the same thing happens there. If it does, I'll get a new watch, if it doesn't; They want access to my iCloud account to see if they can reproduce the problem and fix it.
Click to expand...

Keep us informed on if they can find out what the issue is! Sounds like there are many possibilities for the iPhone battery drain. Hopefully Apple can figure these out and fix it in an update soon!
 
I have unpaired the watch and my 5C's battery life has returned to normal; 10 minutes of idle usage in an hour. (more when people use whatsapp too much.)

Paired the watch to my GF's SE; she was cleaning the home so the watch got enabled quite a bit so there was a battery scare there, but her phone only had 40 minutes of usage after 4 hours and just a 2 percent drop in battery. Will be testing it a bit more tonight but it seems like the problem does not exist on her phone/icloud combination.
 
I find that the now playing app shows up in the dock, but I think it is actually designed that way?
 
tivoboy said:
I find that the now playing app shows up in the dock, but I think it is actually designed that way?
Click to expand...

You can set your items in your dock from the Watch App on the phone. There is also a most recently used one that is all the way to the right of the other apps.
 
Macaddict16 said:
You can set your items in your dock from the Watch App on the phone. There is also a most recently used one that is all the way to the right of the other apps.
Click to expand...

yes, thank you - aware of that.

but for example, I never put the now playing at the end of the dock, either on the phone or on the watch and it doesn't show up on the iphone (in the watch app) as appearing in the dock, and yet it's in the dock at the end so I think it's just designed that way - to always be there?

maybe it's always there for people who have any music loaded?
 
tivoboy said:
yes, thank you - aware of that.

but for example, I never put the now playing at the end of the dock, either on the phone or on the watch and it doesn't show up on the iphone (in the watch app) as appearing in the dock, and yet it's in the dock at the end so I think it's just designed that way - to always be there?

maybe it's always there for people who have any music loaded?
Click to expand...

Which end of the dock is it in? All the way to the left or all the way to the right?
 
Macaddict16 said:
Which end of the dock is it in? All the way to the left or all the way to the right?
Click to expand...
all the way to the right.. after the recently used. but it cannot be deleted from there and it's not on the phone watch app as in the dock?
 
tivoboy said:
all the way to the right.. after the recently used. but it cannot be deleted from there and it's not on the phone watch app as in the dock?
Click to expand...

It sounds like the Watch is tying to play music on it's own. The spot all the way on the right is for the most recently use app. Maybe try and switch the playlist synced to one with only a few songs and see if the sync completes? Or you could try to unpair and repair. That fixed my last issue.
 
Macaddict16 said:
It sounds like the Watch is tying to play music on it's own. The spot all the way on the right is for the most recently use app. Maybe try and switch the playlist synced to one with only a few songs and see if the sync completes? Or you could try to unpair and repair. That fixed my last issue.
Click to expand...
it's odd though, it's been there since restoring the watch and before syncing ANY playlists or music.

I'll try a restore repair, but won't it just setup the dock the way it is now?
 
tivoboy said:
it's odd though, it's been there since restoring the watch and before syncing ANY playlists or music.

I'll try a restore repair, but won't it just setup the dock the way it is now?
Click to expand...

Hmmm... That is odd. I would set it up as new if you can. Before unpairing, when you go into music does it say sync pending next to any playlist?
 
Since it already came on my brand new watch I'd say it is normal. If you look at the dot below it you can see that it is just a circle which is the same as the most recent app.

The drain is caused by something else and I think it is the new approach of watchOS 3. Apple has made some performance improvements where it simply is loading more data in the background, especially for the apps in the dock. Since there is more background activity going on there should also be more battery drain on the iPhone as well as the watch. How much I don't know.
 
Alright; I had to restore my phone and watch and NOT login to iCloud.

My usage stats and battery life have been way better so far; Numbers stand for usage time. The last numbers (26 minutes on the iPhone and 19 on the watch) have been measured after 4 hours of standby time, of course I haven't used the devices for that long since they sat idly, but I can understand how maybe the bluetooth on my quite old 5C might account for some of that. For comparison; on an SE the phone and watch used around 14 minutes each. Though the SE was connected to an icloud profile (not mine) and had interaction with whatsapp, while the 5C only has stock apps and received 1 iMessage.

0 iphone -0 watch 20:08

18 i - 14 w 21:46

20 i - 15 w 22:19

26 i- 19 w 00:00


Tomorrow I will have another conversation with the senior advisor; my guess would be that there's going to be a diagnostic on my iCloud account. I'm hopeful this will resolve my problem and also the problem of low battery life on all my iOS devices (maybe I can finally enable push mail and background refresh!)
 
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