Gear S3 extreme battery drain after One UI update!

[Makisg]

Hi Folks,

My Gear S3 battery is draining like CRAZY since the One UI update! I took it off the power at 08.00hrs this morning and it went down to 20% by 12.00hrs (noon)!!! That's with the wifi OFF, with the gps OFF, with hardly any usage and with no apps running in the background! I am extremely disappointed with Samsung! Its ridiculous that this is still happening after all those complaints from thousands of users who faced similar issues following previous updates over the last few years! You would have thought they would have fixed it by now. But no. When I had this problem during an earlier update I found that installing an older version (from a third party website) of the Gear S plugin fixed the problem. It seems this new update has gotten rid of that earlier plugin and the new plugin is killing it. I tried re-installing the old plugin but it failed this time, so I suppose they've blocked it.  I completely reset my watch now but I think nothing will change. If I have any improvement I will post it on here. 

Anybody else facing the same problem? Any solutions???

[gjmaryy]

You're lying. Everything is NOT okay. The issue would still be there. You just found a solution on how to get rid of the battery drain by changing some option on your watch. It doesn't mean that the issue is gone. You paid lot of money for it. So, it should work 10/10 for all options.

[Jayemmee]

Who is lying gjmaryy ??

[Ash11]

Surprisingly, the issue was still awful, like 6 or 8 hours max until I left my watch charging while off all of Saturday.

I put my watch in at 5:30am my time, 8 hours ago, and I'm still at 84% battery. That's so much better.

I haven't tried aod yet, however.

I'm just saying it's a lucky workaround

[SPark89]

Thanks guys  for the  solution!  I tried many  resets with restore and without but turning on the "Touch to wake feature" fixed the excessive battery drain when Always on display was enabled. I didnt have issues battery drain when Always on display was off.

[Ash11]

I received a new update Friday, and boy did itever improve the battery life. They also reverted the sync alarm feature. It now behaves like it used to.

With aod off, I put my watch on at 8am, it still has 77% battery left. That's fantastic.

Update details.

https://www.sammobile.com/news/new-gear-s3-update-disables-automatic-alarm-sync-with-smartphone/

[Shaheem]

Same issue here as well. Update is killing the phone !!

[Simon-D]

It Amazes me how even now 29/08/19 theres still no solution nor comment from samsung? It's obviously a known issue with this new update as mine was 2-3 days with no charge required and after update 1 day almost! They've said to me to send it in as it's out of warranty and iv'e told them where to go as its a firmware issue not the battery or other, and I'm certainly not paying anymore than the original cost of the watch (Gear S3 Frotier) when it's spent half it's life in a cupboard. I reset the watch for the 3rd time yesterday and recieved an update of arong 11mb i believe for the alarm sync but it's not change the battery drain. My wifi, AOD, permissions are off, no backgroud apps and i have to touch wake up. Which IMO is kind of pointless having a smart watch that isn't that smart. You would expect something to be announced but they seem to be shying away from this in hopes people fall silent. 

[Jayemmee]

Well I finally solved the problem!!!

I went into my local Samsung shop and spoke to their support department.  They took the watch to do some checks on it and a few days later I got my watch back with a brand new "motherboard" and they had also replaced the battery at the same time. 

My watch was built in March 2017 so was out of warranty and I was expecting to be charged, even if it was just a fee for diagnosing the fault.  I was very surprised (and pleased)  that there was no charge, so I suspect it is possibly a "known problem" with older revisions of the motherboard and they simply replaced it.

Since then my battery has regularly lasted over 4 days - it is even better than before.   

[cba]

This means: the system update destroyed the watch?

Hopefully but - or at least in rare conditions...!

[Jayemmee]

@cba

It means that the software update is probably not compatible with all versions of older watches.