When the Apple Watch Ultra was released last September, one of the features reviewers raved about was the hugely improved battery life. Apple’s site claims “up to 36 hours of battery life” but many people have experienced even longer life.
After I got my watch in early October 2022, I could easily go 3 days without a charge.
Apple Watch Ultra Battery Life Woes
About 2 months ago, I started having difficulties with battery life. I would charge it overnight and have only 30% left by that evening. Obviously, something was wrong.
First, I realized that my watch was only charging to 80% overnight. I discovered this was a feature called Optimized Battery Charging. To prolong battery life, the watch monitors your usage and if practical only charges to 80% battery capacity. See, About Optimized Battery Charging on your Apple Watch.
I thought that might be part of the problem and changed the setting to charge to 100%, but that didn’t make much difference. I tried shutting my watch down and restarting it a few times, but that didn’t help either.
In frustration, I googled the issue and found some online advice. I followed it by resetting and restoring my Apple Watch, and it resolved the issue. Now I regularly have about 80% of the charge left when I go to bed. I’m assuming if I didn’t recharge it, I’d have 3–4 days of regular use.
How to Restore Watch Battery Life
I found two primary suggestions online:
• Shut down and restart your watch. Apple’s support guides include detailed instructions on how to shut down and restart your watch. See, Restart your Apple Watch for step-by-step instructions.
Sometimes this is all it takes to resolve the difficulty. It’s like restarting a computer when it’s having problems.
If that doesn’t result in a change to your battery life, you’ll need to take a more drastic step:
• Unpair and reset your Apple Watch to factory settings. This is more complicated and involved than shutting down and restarting your watch, but it’s not that difficult.
Apple provides a step-by-step illustrated guide on how to unpair your watch from your phone and erase it, Unpair and erase your Apple Watch.
To set up your Apple Watch after unpairing and erasure, follow the instructions in Set up your Apple Watch. You can choose between doing a restore from a previous backup, or doing a new setup.
I decided to do a new setup because I would rather not take the chance of importing issues from the old backup. It’s not difficult, not nearly as complicated as doing a new setup on a computer. The only thing that took some extra time was to set up my preferred watch face and complications.
Once I’d completed the setup, I went into the Watch app on my iPhone and looked under the “Installed on Apple Watch” section. This lists all of your 3rd party apps and allows you to toggle off apps, so they won’t show on your watch. I toggled off any apps that I didn’t actually use on my watch.
Mission Accomplished: Apple Watch Battery Life Longevity Restored
Since unpairing, resetting, and setting up my watch, I’ve enjoyed excellent battery life.
If you’re having battery life issues and your watch is relatively new, I suggest you take these steps in this order:
1. Shut down and restart your watch. If that doesn’t fix the problem, go to step 2:
2. Unpair, erase and set up your watch.
If, after taking these steps, you still have battery life issues, it’s time to contact Apple Support. You can connect with them by phone, chat, or email. See the Apple Support page.