How To Turn Off Optimized Battery Charging On Apple Watch

watchOS 7 brings Optimized Battery Charging on Apple Watch. This feature was first introduced for iPhones in iOS 13 and is meant to allow devices to adapt to your daily charging schedule and fully charge the battery only shortly before the operating system anticipates that you plan to unplug your device.

While Optimized Battery Charging works great on iPhone because most users plug their devices to an energy source during nighttime, applying this feature on other devices like Apple Watch and AirPods might not be a good idea. That’s because charging these wearable is less predictable and most of the time you want them to fully charge as fast as possible, instead of plateauing at 80%.

How To Disable Optimized Battery Charging

Thankfully watchOS 7 does include the option to turn off optimized battery charging.

• Raise your wrist to wake your Apple Watch and click the Digital Crown.
• Scroll for the Settings app (if you’re using the List view), or tap on the specific icon, in the honeycomb app bundle.
• Scroll for Battery.
• Tap on Battery Health.
• Scroll to Optimized Battery Charging and disable it. You’re asked if you want to turn it off until tomorrow or permanently.

Fact: On the Battery Health screen you can also see how much your Apple Watch’s battery has degraded over time. 100% it means that it is as good as now. Values around 80% point that the battery is nearing the end of its life-cycles.

When Should You Turn Optimized Charging Off?

Unlike your iPhone, you might be sleeping with your Apple Watch strapped on, to better track your sleep. This will force you to charge your watchOS device as soon as you wake up in the morning, before starting your daily activities.
Surprisingly, after repeating this procedure for a week, my Apple Watch Series 6 started to trigger optimized battery charging every morning. The watch would show around 50% remaining battery when connected to the MagSafe puck and less than an hour later it was stuck at 80%, although I obviously needed it to fully charge as fast as possible. If you’re in a similar scenario, I recommend you to disable optimized battery charging!

Turn Off Optimized Battery Charging For AirPods

iOS 14 automatically enables this intelligent charging feature that aims to reduce battery ageing for AirPods too. However, charging patterns of your wireless earbuds can be truly random and you might end up with your AirPods charged to only 80% when you pick them up.
Happily, you can stop optimized battery charging for AirPods too. This is done from the paired iPhone, in the Bluetooth settings area. A quick how-to guide is available here.

Optimized Battery Charging is enabled by default on Apple Watch. Do you find it useful or you decided to turn it off? Use the comments section to share your feedback.

Related: Do you know that you can add and remove Control Center toggles in watchOS 7?