Apple Watch battery drain

KtinaTravels

As of March 3rd, 2020 I am still having this issue. I went to my iPhone X settings and had apple health stop allowing cronometer to read the info but THEN, every single day that I had finalized lost all that data (I made a separate post in suggestions to have finalized days remain the same despite setting/goal changes. Caloriecount.com was able to do this so I don't see why cronometer wouldn't be able to).

I opened the cronometer app after my workout today at 8am and by 1pm I had 40% left. I have to sit here and charge it up (I take my watch charger everywhere with me now).

I pay for Gold and when I pay for something I expect it to work. If the developers could find out what is going on between apple health and the cronometer app that would be FANTASTIC. There is some kind of glitch in the system somewhere that even after closing cronometer the battery on both the phone and the watch drain, drastically.

The only other option for would be to take my average "Active calories" and set my activity at that level (AKA stop using my apple watch as a fitness tracker) and manually log my workouts. But what is the point? I use cronometer and my apple watch so it does it for me.

VERY frustrating. But at least we could all have bigger problems. But, a fix for this one would be nice.

CWarren

I not only had to stop allowing Cronometer to read/write to Apple Health but I had to unpair my watch, setup as new and reset my phone back to factory settings. After that I have tons of battery available each and every day. All I can think is that the Cronometer app once opened keeps pinging Apple Health data and therefore the watch over and over causing the battery to drain quickly almost as if in some eternal read/write data loop. I still find Cronometer and Gold worth it but better when acting as a solo resource independently from Apple Watch.

Allan

My Watch battery life has been very sporadic lately, usually lasts till around 4-5 pm. Today it died before 1 pm with the only difference from other days is that I was troubleshooting a Shortcut that reads from Heath several times each time it is run. Most days Cronometer has by far the most interaction with Health, today it was Shortcuts by far. This makes me believe the bug has more to do with read/write to Health than with Cronometer.

sweetramona

I do think it has to do with reading and writing to Health, but I have at least 3 other apps that I use on a daily basis that read and write to Health without causing this problem. I can work around it on days I am home or at work most of the day but I have travel coming up and the app is essentially unusable due to this issue.

DrHeather

I’m also having both the quick Apple Watch 3 battery drain issue and an issue with my Iphone 11 stopping updating my activity information from my watch entirely about every 3 weeks-have to unpair and repair the watch to get the two to start working together again. It only started after I began using Cronometer Gold. I really don’t want to have to unpair Apple Health from Cronometer but having to reset the watch so often is frustrating.

Gwilly86

I am having the battery drain issue and my cousin is having battery drain and activity lag or not showing up in her phone. We have had the watches for 4-5 months no problems and now that we downloaded cronomter (which I love) we are seeing the issues. This is effecting how we track calories and making our watches almost unusable.. I understand that the app shouldn't be directly accessing the watch, but is it accessing an API incorrectly which could be causing this?

Facens

I also have this problem, which makes Cronometer unusable. Are there news from the development team? This issue is critical.

Spencer

These issues plagued me for months across several OS resets and new watches and everything else. I ended up switching to a Garmin Instinct watch and Pixel phone (the app works on Apple to) and haven't had a problem since. I mainly use the watch for activity / calorie tracking which for whatever reason the Apple watch just could not do reliably.

I'm not convinced this is a Cronometer problem but who knows. At the end of the day the Apple platform didn't work reliably and I need for this stuff to work reliably so I can stay on track!

Gwilly86

I wanted to follow up here. I have since reached out to Cronometer support and they have told me that development is working on "Fixing some issues with the apple health connection" though they didn't mention battery drain specifically.

All that being said, I have also disabled the connection from Cronometer to Apple health and am doing things somewhat manually at the moment. My battery has returned to normal. My cousin has also removed her connection and her battery has returned to normal. So I am pretty sure it is a problem with cronometer. I hope they are able to fix these issues.

When a new version arrives I will get it a try again.. I sure hope they can figure it out.

redsta417

There is a definite correlation between Cronometer and Apple Watch battery drain. I have done a great deal of troubleshooting across two iPhones and two Apple Watches.

With Cronometer installed on iPhone and connected to Apple Health, my Apple Watch battery cannot make it through a full day. It generally reaches less than 20% by or before 12 hours of usage. Additionally, I routinely experience sync delays for Apple Watch activity with the iPhone Health App.

For one week in March, I removed Cronometer from my iPhone and installed and used MyFitnessPal. For one week in April, I removed Cronometer and installed and used LoseIt.

For both of these one-week periods, the Apple Watch battery performance was significantly improved. I could go the entire day [17-18 hours] on one charge, ending up with approximately 30-35% remaining battery at bedtime. Additionally, the Apple Watch activity sync to iPhone Health App was significantly improved.

After using MyFitnessPal and LoseIt, I have struggle with the choice to go back to Cronometer or continue with one of the other apps. Cronometer is superior to the all other nutrition tracking apps that I've tried. The database is cleaner, it can track many more nutrients, it's very customizable for tracking specific goals, the interface is much less cluttered, and more. But, having to constantly monitor battery life and making sure to have a charging cable with me at work, home, and the car is a genuine annoyance.

Allan

The correlation between Cronometer and Watch battery drain is indirect. I have been working with Apple’s Shortcuts app and made a Shortcut that reads 60 Health data samples with every run. If I run this Shortcut 10 times both my Watch and iPhone 6s need a charge. As Cronometer appears to read from Health, add new entry values to that value then write to Health 1 entry a day for each sample there is a lot of read interactions between Cronometer and Health, just like my Shortcut.
I haven’t use Lose It so don’t know what it does. When I used MyFitnessPal a couple years ago it wrote every entry to Health at entry time.
Cronometer has less data, 1 entry per sample per day at 12:00 am, in Health but does a lot of reads.
MyFitnessPal has a lot more data, several entries per sample per day at each entry time, in Health and does a lot of writes but few, if any, reads.

redsta417

Thanks, Allan, for sharing what you have discovered. That's very interesting information about the read and write activity as reflected in the Health app. It's helpful to know that read activity from Shortcuts had a similar affect.

It's interesting that your iPhone battery is also affected, whereas it's only the Watch battery affected in my situation. That could be a matter of the iPhone 6s vs iPhone 11 [newer battery]. Even though my iPhone 11 battery doesn't get depleted, Cronometer is typically at the top of apps listed in "battery usage" in iPhone Settings > Battery.

I too noticed there's a difference in data entry points of Cronometer compared with MyFitnessPal [and LoseIt]. Cronometer, like you pointed out has one entry per day, while the other apps have several.

However, Cronometer's single entry [time-stamped as midnight] is updated or overwritten each and every time Cronometer app is used throughout the day. Just opening Cronometer and waiting a couple seconds, the app refreshes itself and overwrites each entry in Health app. So the single data sample actually represents many write actions.

This is verifiable. Open Health app and, for example, open Nutrition > Dietary Energy > Show All Data > choose latest entry. The field "Date Added to Health" shows the a timestamp that matches the last time Cronometer was used.

Cronometer app, whether it's read activity or write activity, definitely has a verifiably greater effect on Watch battery usage than the other nutrition tracking apps that also read and write with Health app. Yesterday, I used LoseIt and ended the day at ~40% battery after about 18 hours. Today, I re-installed Cronometer and the Watch battery is at 29% after about 7.5 hours.

Spencer

Wow, nice troubleshooting guys! That reminds me that before I switched to Android, Cronometer was always the top battery drain on the phone as well (even after I ditched the watch).

I'm switching back to my iPhone for a variety of reasons. I'm tempted to try the watch again before I sell it. As a workaround, I might try disabling the Apple Health link and just inputting calories burned manually.

Even the Apple Store's advanced diagnostics couldn't tell me what was chewing up battery on the watch. That lack of visibility drove me nuts (and just seems so common with Apple). They even did repair claim on it but the problem continued of course.

It's crazy to me that if this is indeed a Cronometer issue that it hasn't been top priority and is still going on a year later. The battery drain and activity not syncing makes this stuff unusable.

DrHeather

I finally gave up and disconnected Apple Health from Cronometer- the sync lag went away and the battery life issues are much improved. I hope these issues are fixed soon, until then probably won’t be using the app.

Allan

@redsta417 my iPhone battery health is at 78% and drains quickly no matter what I do, a few weeks ago when Numbers and Pages where updated the download and install drained about 20% of my battery. My Watch is a Series 0, 2 months shy of 5 years, so its battery health is probably low. That said Health is by far the biggest battery drain.

Spencer

@Allan what does the battery health show on your iPhone? If you can find a local repair shop you can probably get the battery replaced for under $100 if need be.

I switched back to my iPhone X and Garmin Instinct watch and so far haven't had any issues. I loved my Apple Watch when it worked! But the Garmin is a far superior fitness tracking system which is mainly what I used it for.

Nick304

Wow, this thread saved me from potentially getting rid of my Apple Watch (Series 5) because I thought it was defective due to the massive battery drain! I reviewed seemingly hundreds of articles about what could be causing my watch to drain battery so quickly, but never did it enter into my head before stumbling across this thread that Cronometer was the source of the issues since it doesn't even have an Apple Watch app but, lo and behold, I deleted the Cronometer app from my iPhone and the battery-drain problem - which I had been dealing with for months - was instantly solved. (I had also been running into the Activity-sync lag that others have noted, and that, too, seems to be completely solved.)

Cronometer support - I love your product but this is a MASSIVE issue that needs to be addressed ASAP. It is ridiculous that a single iPhone app that doesn't even have an Apple Watch version should basically single-handedly make the Apple Watch unusable. Given the understandable complexities a fix might entail, I'd also strongly suggest an email to all users, or a notice that appears prominently on the Cronometer home page, that makes clear that this is an issue so that people aren't struggling with their Apple Watches for weeks like I was.

(For others who are encountering this problem, my workaround is to log my food via the iPad and web apps, and then just manually enter my calories burned according to my Apple Watch at the end of each day. It's an annoyance but so much better than having my Apple Watch be dead in ~6 hours or fewer.)

Spencer

@Nick304 did you try disconnecting Apple Health in Cronometer first? I wonder if that's all it'd take.

Karen_Cronometer

Hi everyone,

We have a new update including a potential fix for the Apple Watch batter drain! If ya'll could give it a shot to see if things have improved we would be grateful for your help.

Cheers,

redsta417

Hi Karen,

Good news! The new update has resolved the Apple Watch battery drain issue.

I re-enabled the setting option to sync with Apple Health last Saturday, so it's been about seven days, and so far the battery life on the Apple Watch is doing well.

I've notice a slight hit to battery, between 5 to 10% less battery charge by the end of each day, compared to the prior week. I'm still ending each day with ~40% battery life on Apple Watch [off the charger for 15 to 16 hours]. It's night-and-day better compared to what was happening before.

Thank you!

DrHeather

The update appears to have fixed the battery drain issue.I also had an issue with updates from my watch to the iPhone being delayed and eventually stalling, requiring a full reset, so it will take awhile to see if that issue has been fixed.

CloudyDayLover

Sadly, it did not fix it for me. When I have the connection with Apple Health turned off, my Apple Watch battery lasts all day; when I have it on, my watch battery runs out after 10-11 hours.

And yes, I tried unpairing the watch. I even tried setting it up as an entirely new watch, without restoring from backup. No luck...

This is a sufficiently serious problem for me that I may need to go back to the app I used to use, even though I like Cronometer better.

Karen_Cronometer

Thanks for checking it! We have some more changes we are experimenting with to address the battery drain. I will update again we release them.

Cheers,

RichardMartin

I just want to report that i have the same problem as most other people in this thread: watch battery drain and delayed syncing between apple health and watch.
After the latest update, the battery definitely holds longer, but not quite as long as it did before i started using cronometer. The sync delay however is still there... as of now, it hasnt synced since 1.5 days ago.

Using Apple Iphone XS and Apple watch 3. Latest firmware on both and latest version of cronometer.
Also, i tried all the other tricks mentioned in this thread a few times.

If i uninstall cronometer for testing purposes, will all my logged data and saved recipes be deleted?

Karen_Cronometer

Hi RichardMartin,

Your account data will remain intact if you uninstall and reinstall the app, so you can give that a try!

RichardMartin

I'm reporting my findings here since this seems to be a recurring issue so maybe it's useful for someone else.

The problem with apple watch not writing data to apple healthkit most likely does not have anything to do with cronometer. This is reasonable since lots of other people have this issue without using cronometer. I also have this issue now even though i uninstalled cronometer. To get everything working i have to unpair-repair apple watch and reboot watch and Iphone. Then it works for a few days maybe before it stops syncing again. This is regardless if i use cronometer or not.

The battery draining problem was most likely cronometer related since the Iphone accesses the healthkit database in a more energy demanding way when using cronometer and this shows up in the battery usage on Iphone. However the latest cronometer patch improved this alot. Not quite as good as it was before latest apple patch and cronometer, but it's not an issue for me anymore.

DrHeather

My experience has been different-I had the sync lag while I had Apple Health connected to Cronometer and ended up having to do the unpairing-repairing several times. I removed the connection several months ago and my watch has synced to my iPhone perfectly ever since. I am using the watch version 3 and an iPhone 11.

Hilary

Hi @DrHeather have you updated your app to the latest version 3.5.0 ? We have made some changes in this release which should help. You may need to disconnect then reconnect apple health with Cronometer.

DrHeather

Honestly, the link to Crononeter caused so many problems that I am not planning to reconnect until I see others say that the issue has been fixed. I lost a lot of data having to reset my watch repeatedly and don’t want to repeat that.

RichardMartin

Sigh... today the watch stopped talking to apple health again, and the battery started to drain super fast again.
I can't believe the communication problem is a Cronometer issue though, it's super weird if it is. But since apple doesn't care about this and noone else seems to know what the deal is i'll try a couple weeks without cronometer on the phone and see what happens.

@DrHeather does it work for you with the Cronometer app on the phone but without healthkit integration? Or have you removed the Cronometer app completely?