watchOS 26 Drastically Draining Battery

I have a Series 6 watch. Even with a Battery Health of 80% it would make it through at least 26 hours of use. After the upgrade to watchOS 26, that dropped to less than 20 hours.


Chasing a fix I went into settings and turned OFF:

  • Always On
  • Allow Live Activities
  • Background App Refresh
  • Reduced Haptics from Prominent to Default
  • Music - Auto Download
  • Messages - Notification Off
  • Stand Reminders
  • Likely more I don't recall at the moment


So, with 26, I have lost functionality over what I had and still get barely 20 hours.


The battery discharge graph shows no spikes. Just a steady decline. With no detail on what App(s) are consuming battery it is a shot in the dark on trying to resolve the issue.


Looking at the Watch app on my iPhone, under General > Diagnostic Logs there are a large number of entries. When you click on the Download icon the files don't appear to be stored anywhere under the Files (or new Preview) such that they can be opened and read.


Looking for any thoughts I may have missed in trying to restore the life and use of my watch.

Apple Watch Series 6, watchOS 26

Posted on Sep 18, 2025 7:43 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 10, 2025 4:33 AM

This might some people, after days of having a quick draining battery on my series 6 watch, i found that i had apps open in the back ground, To see open apps on your Apple Watch, quickly double-press the Digital Crown

One of them was a golf app that was probably use the GPS on the watch all day everyday, once i closed all the apps it was back to normal.

Strangely turning the watch off and on didnt close the apps, they were still open in the back ground.

i did check the diagnostic logs and shared them to gemini AI to find out what was causing the issue and it was something constanly pinging the gps location

46 replies

watchOS 26 Drastically Draining Battery

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