Never run out of energy again before the end of the day by adopting the right reflexes to sustain the autonomy of your connected watch.
Apple’s connected watch may seem superfluous at first glance. But you just need to have one on your wrist for a few days to realize how useful it is on a daily basis. It allows you to see who is calling or sending you a message without taking your iPhone out of your pocket, to quickly take a call if your iPhone is not in direct proximity, but also and above all to monitor certain aspects of your health.
Unfortunately, these very practical functions have a certain energy cost. Depending on how you use the Apple Watch, its battery life can drop very quickly. To limit the damage, certain reflexes can however be adopted. Here they are.
1. Turn off screen display
If you have a Watch Series 5 or higher, you’re probably using it with the screen constantly on. This is also one of the peculiarities of the Watch from the Series 5 to the most recent models, with the exception of the Watch SE. This function, also called Always Onalthough very practical, it is one of the main sources of energy consumption.
To save a few precious minutes of autonomy, you can therefore deactivate it. To do this, open the Watch app on your iPhone, go to the Brightness & Display menu, then under Always On, turn off the option.
However, make sure that the Wake on wrist raise mode is activated so that the screen of your Watch lights up as soon as you look at it.
2. Turn off unnecessary notifications
For some applications like Messages or WhatsApp, receiving notifications on the Watch is rather practical, especially if you do not have the possibility to consult your iPhone. But for other applications, receiving notifications on the Apple Watch is simply useless and unnecessarily nibbles away at its autonomy.
To limit the arrival of notifications to applications that you consider essential, open the Watch app on the iPhone and go to the Notifications menu. To manage notifications related to applications natively installed on the Watch, you must enter each of them one by one in order to modify your preferences.
For third-party apps, go to the Track alerts from section, then disable any apps you don’t want to receive notifications for on your Watch.
Apps that you leave active will receive the same notifications on the Watch that you usually receive on the iPhone.
3. Don’t call with your Watch
Unless you want to impersonate Michael Knight, using your Watch to make calls might not be the best idea. In addition to allowing everyone around you to follow your conversation, the autonomy of this one risks melting like snow in the sun.
You can always take a quick call if you’re really far from your iPhone, but switch to it as soon as possible to resume the call there to give your tocante some breathing space.
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4. Don’t overuse GPS, cellular network and sensor measurements
The longer you use your Apple Watch independently of your iPhone, the faster its battery will drain. To ensure as long an autonomy as possible, it is advisable to use the GPS and the 4G connection of this one (when you have an equipped model) with parsimony. Avoid using Maps all day to guide you, or streaming music from Apple Music, Spotify or even Deezer using the cellular network.
In the same way, if you plan to use your Watch to record several sports activities in quick succession in a single day, the autonomy of your watch may not be sufficient to last at least a whole day. So only save the sessions that are most important to you, and use Reserve mode when the end of the day arrives.
5. Sort out and limit the use of background apps
You probably have apps on your Watch that you don’t use and probably never will. By default, when you download an app to your iPhone, the associated companion app is also downloaded to your Watch. Therefore, when you launch the update of your iOS applications, those of WatchOS are also updated. And that’s not really good news, because each application installed on the Watch is likely to update the data it contains by downloading it in the background, thus reducing the watch’s autonomy a little more.
Start by doing a little sorting among the applications installed on the Watch. To do this, open the Watch app on your iPhone, then in the My Watch tab scroll down to the Installed on Apple Watch section.
Enter the menu for each app you no longer want to appear on your watch and turn off Show App on Apple Watch.
Then enter the General menu and go to Background App Refresh.
Then disable each app that you don’t want to allow to update on the Apple Watch in the background.