Sudden and extreme battery drain (1% every 5 minutes) - Galaxy Watch 4 46mm LTE

[JoshyPan]

Hello everyone,

I am having a problem since yesterday with the battery usage on my new GW4.

Yesterday, my Watch 4 classic 46 mm died after 12 hours of extremely light usage.

Today it was better until I talked using LTE. I lost exactly 22 % in 20 minutes of talking. Since then I am losing 1% of battery every 5 minutes. For reference, in 30 minutes (measured every 5 min) it went from 37% down to 32%, and down to 26% in 60 minutes. So we are talking about losing more than 10% per hour!

Battery is optimized, all apps are closed, I rebooted many times and I have it resting on the table with everything turned off except bluetooth.  Connection to my phone (Note 20 Ultra) is ok. I rebooted the phone as well at the same time before I started measuring. I cannot make it stop loosing 1% every 5 mins. Something is completely off. I just wiped the cache as per some user's instructions.

I remember back when I had an android watch I had exactly the same random issues. Went to GW3 and everything was mint. Now I face them again. Unacceptable for its price. It's one week old and I already hate the battery...

[Bliss]

51% battery drain in 3hrs...this is unacceptable. I want to return this brick and get a full refund.

[dvdhpr]

Yep same problem..really not happy

[Ivan_777]

Hi!

I have the same problem, 31.10.2021 During the sleep my GW4 46mm LTE lost 60% of battery, and after that, every time I look at watch, battery has loosing 1%. In local support told me to try reset connections on my phone, I reseted my GW4 and connection on my phone, charging GW4 and will look what happen after this procedure...

[Ivan_777]

UPD:

After reseting connections and GW4 all looks ok for now.

[Riham88]

i have big battery drain issue with my GW4 46mm LTE,  when I go out without my cell phone, and leave the watch connected via LTE,  it consumes 40-50% of battery in three hours or so. Practically makes LTE useless...

When the watch stays connected to my phone via BT, all is ok. i have the latest firmware...

I hope some update will fix this?!?

[fstap]

I have the 40mm version, with energy saving on, Bluetooth headphones connected + music playing via Spotify, HR measurement every ten minutes, tap to wake on, tilt to wake off, GPS off, LTE on demand I get pretty much exactly 1h20mins from 100% to 0% if I am not connected to wifi or to my phone. That is completely unacceptable and feels like a joke. I mean, sure, it's the smaller version, but come on.. The reception for mobile networks is great everywhere around here, seems like the built in modem goes haywire. I hope software updates fix this as wear OS 3 is pretty new.

EDIT: After some investigation I came to the conclusion that it isn't all Samsungs fault. Spotify is also doing its best to reduce the battery life of the watch as much as possible. It streams the playback progress to all the devices, consuming a huge amount of battery life (because it does so via LTE if WiFi and the phone are not connected). There is no 'go offline' button, so theres nothing we can do about that. If I play back music via mp3 files downloaded to the watch, the battery life still is extremely bad but it adds at least 20 - 30 minutes of playing time. You can vote for the idea here:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Idea-Submissions/Android-Other-Spotify-Wear-OS-Go-Offline/idi-p/530...

[micber67]

I have a galaxy 4 classic wifi and had a similar issue in April of this year when I was under warranty. The watch would last about 12 hours a day or night. I sent it in and they basically said that a bad update to the watch caused half an update. My watch said it was up to date and I had done multiple resets to try to fix.
Samsung said this in my ticket.
Original Problem:
SOFTWARE UPDATE - MOBILE OS UPDATES - INCOMPLETE SOFTWARE UPDATE

Problem found:
WON'T DOWNLOAD SW/PRL

Solution:
S/W UPDATED - PASSED ALL FUNCTIONAL TESTING

Seems like they just ran an update, right? No they didn't. They flashed firmware. I want to do the same since I am pretty technical. They won't give me a link to any firmware but happy to let me pay 80$ out of warranty to fix. So nice of them! They won't share the firmware file for their watches but do for their phones. Why???

I have found on some forums a copy of firmware for my watch and will be flashing it in about a week and will let you know if that fixes it or bricks it. If it bricks I will buy a ticwatch 5 pro. This is my third Samsung watch and they always develop some issue. If I can keep flashing it when this happens I will keep the watch and share with you how to and where to get the files. Samsung won't work with me and I will never buy another product from them again due to this.

[micber67]

I have fixed my sudden draining issue through flashing the watches firmware and after 48 hours of the watch figuring out my usage patterns it now is at 94% when I woke this morning. I charged fully before I went to bed.  Before it was showing 50% in the morning with the same routine.   I will post a video to YouTube of how I did the change.  I also allowed the watch to fully update after the flash.  My channel is YouTube.com/@nrdtech.  It will be my first video of many more

[micber67]

I will be posting a video on updating the firmware this weekend which has solved my problem

Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSiiu6Ibnb6wjjM7Lrt4PlA