Since the pinned beta thread is three years old, and miles long, I wanted to post here to see what the impressions were on watchOS 5's performance so far, in terms of speed and battery life. Any thoughts?
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watchOS 5: Performance
- Thread starter mavis
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Well, I guess no one else has installed the beta. ha
So I just installed it; first impressions are that it's as fast as watchOS 4 was (on an AW3) - pretty much exactly the same. In fact, the only difference that's immediately noticeable is that the high/low temps are italicized now, on the Modular face with the weather in the middle. Oh, and the editable Control Center (which is GREAT). I'll report back on the battery life, tomorrow - I'm not expecting it to be very good, given that it's a beta.
So I just installed it; first impressions are that it's as fast as watchOS 4 was (on an AW3) - pretty much exactly the same. In fact, the only difference that's immediately noticeable is that the high/low temps are italicized now, on the Modular face with the weather in the middle. Oh, and the editable Control Center (which is GREAT). I'll report back on the battery life, tomorrow - I'm not expecting it to be very good, given that it's a beta.
Here are a few quick observations.
Speed-seems very fluid on my S3. Animations look great and overall no major stutters. Through limited playing around nothing has crashed.
Battery- lost 5% wearing it overnight which is typical for my watch. Did a 30 minute run and lost about 20%. Typical.
Workout—added a running metric but it made all of the numbers on the workout screen jumble. A bug but I also think this is indicative of a larger screened watch.
Music—watch says there is no music synced but it shows 450 songs. Took several minutes to stream a playlist over LTE. Odd. Also there is an alert my watch has no more space for music. Weird.
Podcast- it works. I think there are some issues on how to use it as there aren’t instructions but it does work. Outcast has been deleted from my watch.
Weather—more information like wind speed and UV are nice. I have left Carrot because if issues so it’s nice to see a little more robust weather in the stock app
Control Center—customizable is awesome.
Speed-seems very fluid on my S3. Animations look great and overall no major stutters. Through limited playing around nothing has crashed.
Battery- lost 5% wearing it overnight which is typical for my watch. Did a 30 minute run and lost about 20%. Typical.
Workout—added a running metric but it made all of the numbers on the workout screen jumble. A bug but I also think this is indicative of a larger screened watch.
Music—watch says there is no music synced but it shows 450 songs. Took several minutes to stream a playlist over LTE. Odd. Also there is an alert my watch has no more space for music. Weird.
Podcast- it works. I think there are some issues on how to use it as there aren’t instructions but it does work. Outcast has been deleted from my watch.
Weather—more information like wind speed and UV are nice. I have left Carrot because if issues so it’s nice to see a little more robust weather in the stock app
Control Center—customizable is awesome.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
After using the watch for the first whole day with watchOS 5, I'm satisfied with the performance (same as 4.x, basically) but the battery life is pretty bad - I usually finish the day around 70% or more, but today it was at 50% when I stuck it on the charger, about two hours earlier than usual.
That's true, except that iOS 12 has been doing alright with the battery (and is obviously much faster/smoother than 11.4) ... I was hoping that the performance gains would be similar for the AW, but sadly they are not.
I thought I'd share my experience after having it for a few days on my 42mm series 2.
For me, this definitely feels like a first beta. Occasional stuttering, especially with control center and notification center. I tried to restart it a few time to see if that would help but that actually proved to make things worse.
After restarting:
• Auto Unlock no longer works on my Mac (Mac thinks that the watch is still locked).
• Some complications like Activity and Calendar no longer display data and remain blank.
• All messages on the messages app were deleted (however they remained intact on my iPhone which is running iOS 12). • Trying to start a new workout with the "+" button while already in a workout causes the watch to freeze in the workout app, thus requiring a restart.
• Pushing the digital crown will sometime fail to take you out of an app and back to the watch face.
• Occasional respring (has happened twice)
• Terrible battery life
Of course, when I installed the beta I was not expecting this thing to run flawlessly, however I would not recommend getting the watchOS 5 beta until around db 3 or 4.
Anyway, that's my experience so far.
UPDATE: I just rebooted my watch again just for kicks and it actually has fixed a lot of the problems I posted above.
For me, this definitely feels like a first beta. Occasional stuttering, especially with control center and notification center. I tried to restart it a few time to see if that would help but that actually proved to make things worse.
After restarting:
• Auto Unlock no longer works on my Mac (Mac thinks that the watch is still locked).
• Some complications like Activity and Calendar no longer display data and remain blank.
• All messages on the messages app were deleted (however they remained intact on my iPhone which is running iOS 12). • Trying to start a new workout with the "+" button while already in a workout causes the watch to freeze in the workout app, thus requiring a restart.
• Pushing the digital crown will sometime fail to take you out of an app and back to the watch face.
• Occasional respring (has happened twice)
• Terrible battery life
Of course, when I installed the beta I was not expecting this thing to run flawlessly, however I would not recommend getting the watchOS 5 beta until around db 3 or 4.
Anyway, that's my experience so far.
UPDATE: I just rebooted my watch again just for kicks and it actually has fixed a lot of the problems I posted above.
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I was really hoping the S2 would see some improvement. I really felt a huge drop in performance and battery life going from watchOS 3 —> 4. Some of it was fixed with the 4.1 or 4.2 update (I can’t remember which it was ) but still really doesn’t perform as well as it did on WatchOS 3. I guess we’ll see how the betas progress!
Always worth un-pairing and re-pairing your watch if you experience issues, whether it's while running a beta or a production release. Tends to solve a lot of issues.
You can never judge battery performance in the first day or two after updating any variant of iOS.
Why? Does something change or is it because you are playing with it more than normal and that causes the numbers to be off?
It typically will use more CPU in the first 24-48 hours performing indexing.
A week later and my battery is consistently draining about twice as fast as it did on watchOS 4.x ...