5 Apple Watch Battery Saving Tips For watchOS 10 Update

Looking for Apple Watch battery saving tips to fix the excessive watchOS 10 battery drain? Your wrist-worn device isn’t lasting a full day anymore since you updated to the newer version? 10.0.1 update did not fix all battery issues?

Fact: watchOS 10 has revamped the Apple Watch operating system. It’s the biggest overhaul since the release of Apple’s premium wrist-worn gadget. Apparently, it still requires some fine tuning as it lacks energy efficiency.

Apple Watch Battery Saving Tips For watchOS 10

You can apply the following tips to extend the uptime of your wrist-worn device:

1. Turn Off Noise Notifications

Apple watch can measure the ambient sound levels to detect when you’re exposed to loud noise. A notification is triggered when the decibels can lead to hearing harming levels.

Nevertheless, this permanent scanning can have a significant impact on the Apple Watch’s battery life! We recommend you to disable it from the Watch app on the paired iPhone:

• Scroll for Noise, in the My Watch tab.
• Turn Off Environmental Sound Measurements.

2. Remove Widgets From Smart Stack

watchOS 10 brings a Smart Stack widget that provides a quick way to access important data on your Apple Watch. These widget carousel is one swipe-up away and replaces the old gesture for Control Center.

If you’re not using these widgets too often you might as well remove them. Apparently, they are an extra strain on the battery as they keep constantly refreshing data in the background.

Not sure if this can be considered a watchOS 10 battery glitch, but users have reported a gain of up to 25-30% in battery life after removing the widgets!

How to:

• Wake the screen and turn the Digital Crown to bring up the Smart Stack.
• Long-press on a widget to enter Edit mode.
• Use the red ‘minus’ icon to remove each widget.

Tip: Some widgets show Pinned instead of the remove option? Unpin it first by tapping the top-right icon and then use red removal icon that shows up instead of ‘Pinned’.

3. Disable Always-On Display

According to this user, the AOD feature burns more battery than in previous watchOS version.

You can try to disable it and see if you notice a significant difference in battery uptime. Let us know if you notice the same.

Tip: AOD can be disabled directly from the watch in Settings -> Display & Brightness -> Always On.

4. Tweak Background App Refresh Settings

Apps that haven’t been updated with support for watchOS 10 might cause excessive battery drain when running in the background. You can disable this behavior in:
Settings -> General -> Background App Refresh

Tip: You can turn this feature off completely or only for specific apps.

5. Avoid Weather Widget / Complication

Complication on Watch Face will continue to update even if Background App Refresh is disabled for that specific app.

The Weather app has been reported to be glitchy in these early versions of watchOS 10. We recommend you to remove Weather from both Smart Stack and Watch Face and let us know if you see an improvement in battery life!

6. Removed Synced Music (Extra Tip!)

In some cases synced music was the reason. You can try the following:

• 1. Open the Watch app on the paired iPhone.
• 2. In the My Watch tab, scroll for Music.
• 3. Turn Off the Recent Music toggle and delete any available playlists.
• 4. Wait a couple of minutes and reboot Apple Watch. Do you notice any difference?

Do you notice an Apple Watch battery life improvement after applying the above tips? Do you have other recommendations that can help reduce the watchOS 10 battery drain? Share your feedback in the comments!

Related: Accentuated watchOS 10 battery drain might only be fixed by unpairing and re-pairing the Apple Watch as instructed here.