Sudden battery drain

[minimo3]

Has anyone’s watch suddenly started draining extra quickly. It’s 3pm and mine is totally dead. I used to end the day at 10pm with 50% left. This started happening around April 10?

6 month old series 8
WatchOS 10.3
100% battery health
Only 3rd party app: outlook and PingID
No music, no games, no podcasts, not used for workouts. All it’s used for is notifications

 

[StumpyBloke]

Probably a rogue app stuck. Restart your watch.

 

[minimo3]

Probably a rogue app stuck. Restart your watch.

Thanks for the suggestion, I did a full hard reset yesterday but incredibly it made things worse. I will try a unpair and repair tonight

 

[StumpyBloke]

Thanks for the suggestion, I did a full hard reset yesterday but incredibly it made things worse. I will try a unpair and repair tonight

I think that’s all you can do. If it still has the same issue when you have re-paired it I’d speak to Apple. I’ve not had any issues with my Ultra 2 on the latest software.

 

[Howard2k]

When you re-pair it, do not restore from backup. If it's a software quirk then you're likely to just restore the same issue. Set it up as a new watch.

 

[jz0309]

I would suggest updating to 10.4, I have not experienced battery issues but 10.4 improved battery life both on my Ultra2 and S7 quite a bit.
and yes, I second to not restore from backup in case you do the pairing thing

 

[Maui19]

The same exact thing just started happening to me the last two days. Mine died at 3 PM today when normally it would last all night with 15 or 20% battery life left.

 

[slowpoke]

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWatch/comments/1c279ms
This is a thing. Happened to me. Watch was fully charged when I went to bed. Missed my alarm because it died an hour before I woke up. Seems to have something to do with ios 17.4.1 because my phone updated the previous night and I still haven't updated my watch to 10.4 (and haven't changed any settings/installed any new apps in months).

 

[Aure1]

I had the same when my phone updated to 17.4.1 without the watch being on 10.4

Updated the watch this morning after it died on me twice yesterday, and so far it seems to be back to normal

 

[minimo3]

Wow, I force updated watchOS to match iOS 17.4.1 and turned off auto update and it’s back to normal battery life so far. The working theory on Reddit is that if your watch is set to auto update it’s stuck on a continual checking but unable to update loop in this latest release. Indeed when I looked at my watch the update screen said preparing… and it was stuck there. I had to manually force the update. Turning off auto update will fix the problem recurring when future updates are released. That explains why a hard reset and deleting all 3rd party apps did not work.

Thanks for all the tips everyone!