Google released the Pixel Watch in October 2022 and followed it up with a sequel in 2023. The Pixel Watch 2 fixes a main issue with the original Pixel Watch: the battery life and standby drain.
Due to the high battery drain, many people couldn’t even use it for sleep tracking if they used the watch during the daytime. As a result, they miss out on one of the advertised features, or they have to make specific arrangements for their charging schedules.
Many Pixel Watch users report issues after this year’s new June 2024 update. This is unfortunate since this issue deteriorates the experience of using the product. It does not affect any particular model, and there are reports of severe battery drains from both Pixel Watch 1 and 2 users. A large scale of users report unnatural amounts of battery drain. Note that it won’t affect all units.
The June update for the Pixel Watches has plenty of new features. There’s a new Google Home Favourites widget, Car Crash Detection, improvements to on-wrist detection, and more. The changelog also includes better bicycle fall detection and new algorithms. The June feature drop update for Pixel phones is out, too, if you’re using your Pixel Watch alongside your Pixel phone.
As per several users on Reddit and other media forums, the overall battery life in a 24-hour period is much lower than before. Earlier, it had around 40% remaining battery after a full day of use. Now, the remaining battery is just a single digit after a full day of use, with one charge cycle. It’s the non-LTE variant; the GPS and the tilt-to-wake feature are off, too.
The only potential solution is performing a complete factory data reset. This is not ideal, and data recovery takes a long time. Despite starting with over 80% during the daytime, the charge would drop to single digits by night. Restart doesn’t solve the problem. Some suggest waiting a few days for the optimization to kick in, which might work. Many people claim that the June update is the culprit.
Even if the only use case was checking notifications, with no workouts, some report that the watch goes out of battery by 7 PM on the same day. With sleep and airplane mode on, the standby drain is exceptionally high, at around 30%. Some report extra drain during workouts, which wasn’t there before.
Turning crash detection off might improve the battery life. However, this trade-off isn’t worth it. We don’t recommend updating to the June patch if you are on an older software patch. We don’t know the exact cause of the battery drain, but we can attribute it to the June update. Google did not address the problem officially yet. However, we hope they swiftly fix it in the next July patch.
