- Many Galaxy Watch owners are reporting a battery drain problem
- It seems to stem from a recent software update
- Samsung has yet to comment, but Google Play Services may be the culprit
Samsung makes some of the best smartwatches out there, but we’re seeing numerous reports from Galaxy Watch owners of rapidly draining battery life — and the issue appears to be tied to a recent software update.
As discovered by Android Authority and others, users have taken to Reddit to complain about a sudden drop in battery life. Given the number of comments and upvotes the thread has received, it seems quite a few people are having issues.
Some of the models mentioned in the thread are the Galaxy Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 6 Classic, so this affects more than one device. In one case, a day’s battery life has dropped to just 4-5 hours, which shows the seriousness of the problem.
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One user says battery life has gotten “significantly worse,” while another describes their Galaxy Watch as “burning through the battery like crazy.” One commenter says their watch is now “a total disappointment” and not “what Samsung promised”.
Restart or reset
Is anyone else having this problem? from r/GalaxyWatch
There’s been no official comment on this yet from Samsung — we’ve reached out to the company and will update this story if we hear back. But the Reddit sleuths have noticed that Google Play Services uses a disproportionate amount of battery juice, so it appears to be the villain of this particular piece.
Google Play Services runs in the background on Android phones and watches and handles tasks like connecting apps to the operating system, authenticating users, and reporting location data. It is often updated separately from the main Android or Wear OS software.
Standard troubleshooting methods like rebooting, clearing the data cache or hard reset can help if you see this problem. These techniques seem to have helped some of the affected users, but not all.
It’s also worth mentioning that some users have said they can’t see the battery life described by others – so this doesn’t affect every Galaxy Watch. Let’s hope Samsung can roll out a fix sooner rather than later.
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