Get the Most Out of Your Apple Watch Battery
Do you find your Apple Watch dying before the end of your day? Don‘t worry – with some usage tweaks you can significantly extend its battery runtime.
While Apple cites around 18 hours of battery life, real-world performance depends entirely on how you use your watch. GPS workouts, constant notifications, and bright always-on displays drain the battery much faster than basic usage.
By optimizing settings to disable battery-hogging features and reduce power draw you can easily get 24+ hours of runtime – sometimes as high as 36. This prevents you from needing an inconvenient midday charging session.
Let‘s explore your Apple Watch‘s battery performance and how you can maximize daily life.
Understanding What Impacts Your Battery Runtime
Apple Watch battery life primarily depends on these five usage factors:
Display Usage – Frequent screen wakes, lengthy viewing, high brightness, and always-on drain battery faster. The display is the biggest power draw.
Notifications – Frequent alerts making the watch vibrate and light up consume extra battery with sounds and haptics.
Sensors & Tracking – Continuous heart rate monitoring, GPS, motion sensing use more power during workouts.
Connectivity – Bluetooth, WiFi and cellular access use more battery, as do calls.
Background Activity – App refresh, complications updating also slowly drain battery.
Based on your usage habits your battery runtime can vary wildly. Using the Apple Watch just to check the time can achieve 36+ hours, while a day full of GPS workouts, notifications and cellular calls may only get 12-15 hours.
Compare Battery Runtime Differences
||Basic Usage|Mixed Usage|Heavy Usage|
|-|———|———-|———-|
|Usage Profile|Time checks, notifications off|Averages 1 hr workout, occasional notifications web browsing|2+ hr GPS workout, always-on display, frequent notifications, cellular calls|
|Expected Battery Runtime|36+ hours|18-24 hours|12-15 hours|
As you can see, runtime ranges widely across use cases. The good news is that by optimizing settings you can disable battery draining features and extend the runtime significantly.
What‘s Impacting Your Apple Watch Battery Life?
Before making any changes, pay attention to what‘s consuming your battery the most right now.
Do you frequently raise your wrist just to glance at the time? Do notifications make your watch vibrate constantly? Are you tracking lengthy workouts multiple times a day?
Understanding your unique drainage factors will help guide the best optimizations for your personal usage. Check the battery usage graphs in the Apple Watch Settings app for insight.
Optimize Display Settings to Save Power
The Apple Watch display stays illuminated whenever raised or tapped, enabling convenient time and notification checks. However, keeping pixels active consumes significant battery.
You can easily adjust settings to reduce unnecessary screen wakes and brightness:
Disable Always On Display
Always-on keeps the watch face visible at all times instead of sleeping when inactive. Convenient, but cuts battery life by at least 25-30%.
Turn Off Wrist Raise Wake
This automatically wakes the display with a wrist raise motion. Accidental triggers drain battery over time so you can disable.
Lower Brightness
Less screen brightness means less pixel power draw. Around 75% brightness saves juice while still being visible.
Use a Basic Watch Face
Fancy animated watch faces with second hands and complications use more battery than simple digital or analog faces.
By tweaking display-related settings you can net 1-2 hours or more battery life per full charge. But don‘t stop there…
Reduce Notifications for Maximum Battery Savings
Do you receive tons of notifications each day making your Apple Watch constantly light up, vibrate and ping? All these alerts drain battery very fast, especially with sounds enabled.
Analyze which apps truly require alerts on your wrist rather than just your iPhone. Trim unnecessary notifications that suck power with no benefit.
For example, do you really need to receive hundreds of emails on your wrist all day long? Each one triggers screen wake, vibration and displays content. Probably not essential if you check email on a schedule instead.
Optimizing notifications can save significant battery drain over the course of a day.
Adjust Sensor Usage Based on Workout Needs
The Apple Watch becomes a powerful health and fitness tracker during workouts. However, enabling settings like continuous heart rate monitoring, connecting GPS and detecting motions/paces all consume extra battery.
While you likely want maximum tracking during exercise, there are small adjustments that can preserve battery life:
Use iPhone GPS
Rely on your phone‘s GPS signal instead of the Watch when possible. The watch battery drains much faster while sustaining a GPS lock.
Manually End Workouts
Don‘t rely on auto-pause to detect the end of exercise or it may continue tracking. Manually stop sessions promptly.
Reduce Tracking When Possible
If exercising 5+ hours straight, consider disabling heart rate, pace or distance tracking temporarily to save power.
Every bit helps maximize workout time!
Modify Accessory Connections
In addition to internal sensors and features, connecting accessories also impacts battery drain:
Take Calls From iPhone
When untethered from iPhone, call length impacts battery. Shorten when possible or use iPhone instead.
Turn Off Unused Wireless
Disabling Bluetooth and WiFi when out of range saves periodic high-power connection attempts.
Limit Background App Refresh
Automatic data refresh uses battery. Restrict to only essential apps and features.
Additional Apple Watch Battery Tips
- Turn off visual effects like transparency that use extra GPU power.
- Disable mirroring apps like Mail and Calendar from iPhone.
- Power down Watch before storing long term instead of a full charge.
- Consider Low Power mode to restrict battery draining features.
- Replace battery if runtime decreasing rapidly despite optimizations.
Get The Most From Each Charge
As you can see, optimizing your Apple Watch usage based on your actual needs can extend battery runtime substantially. Analyze your drainage sources, then apply tweaks to disable unnecessary power draw.
With smart adjustments you can easily achieve 24-36 hours battery life rather than 18 hours – avoiding inconvenient mid-day charging. Review settings periodically as new OS updates add features and new usage patterns emerge.
Now enjoy maximizing every bit of juice from your Apple Watch! Let me know if you have any other battery saving tips I missed.
