From one day to the next, my Apple Watch battery was acting strange. This literally emptied just by looking at it and at 2 p.m. in the afternoon it already reached 10% and finally activated the energy saving mode. Finding a solution to this problem was not that easy.
Apple support did not know what to do with it, as the battery was still in perfect condition after an extensive diagnosis. There was also nothing striking to see in the data they generated. But why did the battery run out? I did some research and quickly came to the conclusion that the fault lay with Apple.
Apple Watch battery was heavily taxed
If you experience battery problems with your Apple Watch, it is unfortunately not possible to gain clear insight, as is the case for your iPhone. Because there isn’t one battery option with detailed information about the usage and the status of the battery. The only thing you can check is the usage and the standby time. You can do this via the Apple Watch app ▸ My Watch ▸ General ▸ Usage. To my great surprise these two times were the same and that is strange.
The time that can be found in ‘standby’ is normally the period that you have been wearing the Watch since you removed it from the charger. The time during use is normally only the period that you actually use the Watch or it is active in the background. It is not true that both times are more or less the same, there is usually a big difference, for example: standby ▸ 2 hours, use ▸ 14 minutes.
This information let me know that something was running in the background that was draining the battery, but what? Before I took drastic measures, I first tried the standard solutions, an overview:
- Third party apps removed
- Background refresh disabled
- No apps in the Dock
- Complications disabled
- Siri deactivated
- Fitness tracking (heart rate and calories) stopped
- Ambient sound check disabled
Unfortunately, these solutions did not seem to help. After restoring Apple Watch to factory settings, the battery continued to drain, even when you set it up as new. When I connected the Apple Watch to another iPhone, it turned out that there was nothing wrong with the battery of the Watch, on this iPhone the battery remained ‘normal’.
The problem only occurred when the Apple Watch was paired with my iPhone and set up via this phone. Even when the Apple Watch was used alone without being paired with this iPhone, the battery drained. By chance I discovered that a huge amount of data was being used from my data bundle, almost 2GB in 5 days, to find the cause of this I used a Proxy app.
ProxyMan to monitor network connectivity
To find out whether a device is active on the internet, you can use a Proxy app. You can see a proxy as an access point to the internet. You install such an app on your Mac and add the proxy settings to the network binding of the device you want to monitor. For an iPhone, do this via Settings ▸ WiFi ▸ tap the i next to your WiFi network ▸ Configure proxy.
Using the ProxyMan app I discovered that the Apple Watch was trying to connect to the url “http://gateway.icloud.com” multiple times per second. Given the high number of requests per second to the url and high data usage, this was the cause of the battery issue.
Proxyman is available in Setapp, a kind of Netflix for macOS apps, for a fixed amount per month you have access to 160+ top apps including CleanMyMac X, Gemini, Commander On, PhotoLemur and many more.
Fix Apple Watch battery problem
Now I knew that iCloud was the culprit and the problem could be solved. Logging out of iCloud is easy, but you must take your online data into account, follow the steps below:
- Open settings
- Tap your Name
- Select ‘Log out’
- Enter your password
- Confirm by tapping ‘Log out’ again
Now comes the most important part, iOS will tell you if you want to keep or remove your calendars, Safari data, contacts, notes, etc. from your iDevice. It is important that you remove these, so choose ‘Remove from iDevice’, iOS will then delete the data on your iDevice, but keep it in iCloud. Then restart your iPhone and Apple Watch and log in to iCloud again. After this you will notice that the battery problem is solved.
Good to know: You have to set up Apple Pay again on your Apple Watch
Cause of battery problem
I have not been able to find out exactly what the cause of this battery problem is, and Apple Support does not know what caused it either. My Apple Watch had this problem from one day to the next. Possibly an error with the iCloud server and this remained active in the background. It is unclear whether the problem is caused by watchOS itself, several cases are known on the internet, but it is not a structural problem. Perhaps a watchOS update will solve this problem for future cases.
Extend the battery life of your Apple Watch
The battery life of the Apple Watch is excellent when it has no problems, so you can easily make it to the end of the day. However, the battery life may decrease over time, especially if you still own an older generation Apple Watch. If that is the case, you can apply the Apple Watch tips below to extend the battery life of your smart watch.