A new watchOS update is on the way to fix Apple Watch battery drain issues

If you’ve been experiencing poor battery life on your Apple Watch 9 or an older model since watchOS 10.1 rolled out, you should know that help is on the way – and Apple is preparing a fix in a forthcoming software update.

An internal Apple memo, sent to Apple Authorized Service Providers and seen by MacRumors, says that a fix for battery drain is “coming soon”. However, the memo doesn’t go into any more details, so that’s all we’ve got to go off.

There’s no mention of what exactly is behind the problem, how many people have been affected by it, or what the software patch is going to do to improve the situation – but at least something is now being done about it.

You don’t have to look far to find complaints about the battery drain problem: have a look at Reddit or the official Apple Support Forum for example. The issue seems to be affecting multiple models, including the Apple Watch Ultra 2, running watchOS 10.1.

Software bugs

Of course, watchOS 10.1 was supposed to fix bugs rather than introducing new ones. It also enabled the new Double Tap feature that you can make use of on this year’s Apple Watch models, the Apple Watch 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2.

Bugs are pretty par for the course with updates like this, and it’s rare that an update rolls out that doesn’t have any issues at all, but it’s still disappointing that the user experience has been so significantly degraded for what seems to be a substantial number of people.

Quite how many people are seeing this is hard to judge, but going off the posts we’ve linked to above, these don’t seem to be isolated cases. Our Apple Watch 9 review was written using watchOS 10, so doesn’t have any references to the battery issue.

It’s not just watch updates that are causing Apple problems, either. We’re still waiting for a fix for the bug that is making some iPhones mysteriously turn off overnight, which may have been introduced with the roll out of iOS 17.0.3.

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