Finding very heavy battery drain with this update. From 9am to 10am lost 10% battery. Usually at 7pm I would have 65-70% battery left. Sitting at 50% right now.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Apple Watch Series 7, watchOS 11
After an OS update, it's common to experience an increased battery drain as certain tasks related to the update continue in the background including indexing, you should only experience this increased battery drain for a few days before it goes back to normal.
If after a couple days, your battery is not back to normal, I would recommend unpair and repairing your Apple Watch with your iPhone ⇢ Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support
After an OS update, it's common to experience an increased battery drain as certain tasks related to the update continue in the background including indexing, you should only experience this increased battery drain for a few days before it goes back to normal.
If after a couple days, your battery is not back to normal, I would recommend unpair and repairing your Apple Watch with your iPhone ⇢ Unpair and erase your Apple Watch - Apple Support
watchOS 11.0.1
This update includes bug fixes for your Apple Watch, including:
I chatted with Apple Support who did a remote diagnostics of my AW7. Action:Take it to Genius Bar. They said battery operating at 78% capacity. Said this is the cause of the high drain. Less than 80% requires battery replacement. Nooo! It drained after update to 11.0. Recommendation- send to Apple for $99 replacement of watch or replace battery. Will wait to see if iOS18.2 does anything.
After visiting Genius Bar, I decided to get a new battery for my AW7. It was consistently reporting 78% capacity, which is below the 80% Apple recommends a new battery. It was $99+sales tax. Sent it in on Sunday and Thursday a new AW7 with 100% capacity was delivered. I updated to 11.2 from 11.1 as delivered. I setup as a new watch. Indoor workout for 2.5 hrs listening to music and running AW Workout app. Watch was at 67%. After update to WatchOS11 I could only get through a 30 min workout. I am OK with battery performance now.
Was experiencing rapid battery loss on my watch after latest iOS update (11.2). Tried reset, repairing, etc. Turned off Smart Stack and all is fine again. Not sure what use Smart Stack has but the latest update caused it to use up battery more than twice as fast.
I had the same problem with my watch losing up to 20% of charge in an hour for no apparent reason. Tried unpairing and setting up as new watch but no change. It became apparent that it was the iPhone that was causing the problem. I did a “reset all settings” on the iPhone and after the initial watch syncing process which will drain battery, everything now appears to be back to normal. Hope this might help others.
Like I said previously, I had these same issues. On my watch under settings I turned off Smart Stack and it is fine now. Something happened with last update that affected battery usage with smart stack
Unpairing and connecting my Ultra 2 stopped the battery drain after watchOS 11.0.1 for me, still hesitating to update to watchOS 11.1, since my battery life is at the level of 10.6.1 again.
Another users switched off Bluetooth on the watch and iPhone, which brought the battery life back to normal in his case:
Why is my Apple Watch 10 battery suddenly… - Apple Community
Bought my first apple watch in March 2024 - series 9 (GPS + Cellular). Company pays for service on both so it's paired to my work phone (company supervised/managed iPhone 14). All was working great for about 5 months. Then boom, suddenly started draining excessively fast - like 100% to 0% in 4-6 hours. Tried resetting sync data with no luck so erased contents/settings and restored from back-up. That seemed to help a little but then went back to the same issue. I kept having to repeat this cycle of erasing and setting up watch (restoring from backup) 1-2 times weekly. As time went on, the issue has gotten progressivley worse - now only getting 2-3 hours from full charge. Was finally able to make it to Apple store in December (I don't live close to an Apple store) to have genius bar look at it. They could see the issue with rapid battery drain but couldn't determine the cause--battery health was 96% so they wouldn't replace it. Genius bar advised to send it off to Apple support to try to diagnose if issue was software or hardware related. Got the watch back in the mail 2 weeks later--nothing was found wrong with the watch. Paired it again to my iPhone 14 and same issue returned as before. I then reset my iPhone and restored from back-up (the genius bar tech suggested this as a last resort if Apple support did not find any issues. Still didn't resolve issue.
Returned to Apple store yesterday, again they could see the issue with rapid drain - said it could be because I was restoring watch from backup which may contain a corrupt software issue--genius bar reset the watch, and set up as a new watch, again paired to my iPhone 14. Didn't install any extra apps when pairing (only the default ones are on there). Genius bar told me to keep any eye on it and if that didn't fix it, there may be a software issue with my iPhone that's causing the issue. Got home an hour later and within 2 hours, my watch was dead. So I decided to experiment - reset watch, paired it with my wife's iPhone 13 Pro Max - guess what, no more issues - has lasted all day today and still at 29%. So now the question remains, what's causing the issue with the battery drain when it's paired to MY iPhone? I feel like the only way to fix this now is to reset my phone again but to NOT restore from backup, which means I loose everything--I can't do that. I'm at a loss - any ideas?
Had the same issue, and nothing suggested in this thread seemed to help, including a full reset.
BUT …
At some point I noticed that there were a couple of apps that were constantly “trying” to install but stuck.
I deleted these two apps, and magically the drain stopped.
Watch battery is back to it’s pre-update performance.
Might be anecdotal, but recommend everyone who has this issue to check whether there are any apps stuck in installation or update mode.
So I have been working with Apple directly about the battery draining issue along with a backup issue. The backup issue is that the watches have not been backing up since the beginning of iOS 17. Appears that when you go to settings>iphone storage> and look for the watch app, your backup are showing old ones and not updated backups. This has been reported to an engineer at Apple now. However still leaves the battery draining issue. I finally unpaired 4 of my Apple Watches series 6,7,10, and ultra. All have returned to normal battery cycles. However, the olds of you getting a recent backup may be low per everyone reading this. After unpairing and setting up the watch again backups and battery cycles return to normal. Not for sure if the issue has to do with multiple watches connected to a device which I have 5 which is the max per device. Either way this a bad bug!!! Not for sure if this will ever get resolved. After reading several bugs, the battery draining issue has been present since July and 1st of August in the betas and never got fixed.
in conclusion my recommendation for everyone have issues with the battery is to unpair the (I) set it up as a new watch, but the restore from backup should work too. Hope this helps everyone!!! Good Day Mate!!!
Experiencing battery drain after updating to watchOS 11 is common. Try restarting your watch and phone, turning off unnecessary features, or unpairing and re-pairing your watch. If the issue persists, check for updates or contact Apple Support for further assistance.
watchOS 11.0.1 is out to fix battery drainage issues! 🤞
Try to unpair and pair it again.
My battery life on the Ultra 2 is back to were it was in watchOS 10.6.1.
After 67hours still 19%, every day at least 30min workout, Live Activities switched off, Always On Display disabled. Tracking sleep uses less or around 1% per hour.
Two days ago I installed the latest watchOS 11.1 update and the battery life on my Ultra 2 remained stable.
Unpairing and re-pairing, water watchOS 11.0.1 restored the battery life to normal and the latest watchOS update did not change that. 45hours without charging, 44% battery life left, average use 1.2% per hour, 60min recorded workouts.
Live Activities are still disabled.
Apple Watch battery draining fast after watchOS 11 Update
