Detailed description of the problem:
The battery drain on my Pixel Watch is significantly higher since a while. I guess that either a SAA update or a Pixel watch update caused the higher battery drain.
Before: ~25% of battery life for 8h of sleep tracking
Now: ~50-70% of battery life for 8h of sleep tracking Steps to reproduce:
Version of Sleep as Android:
SAA Version 20250124,
Smartphone Android 15 (5.2.2025),
Pixel Watch (WiFi) WearOS 5.0 AW2a
I’ve got this problem too. Charged it to 100% right before I went to sleep and woke up to 2% after 8 hours. I’ve been using the same setup for over 3 years and only noticed it since the latest update 20250125.
Hello, the new API level on Wear OS version uses more battery.
We prepared an experimental version (5.28_passive) to test, how much of this new battery drain is caused by the new API level and how much could it be on our side.
Would you be willing to test? https://sleep.urbandroid.org/wp-content/uploads/release/SleepWear-5.28-passive.apk
The battery consumption will probably not be the same as on the old API level, we are trying to find out, how much we can do with it.
This is an estimate, but I know that I took it off the charger right when I was going to bed, I didn’t wear it all day so I assume charge of 100%. Wake up 7.5 hours later with 2%.
Was it a consistent consumption, even after a reboot? Sometimes, the consumption skyrockets, if there is something stuck in the caches that keeps overusing the battery and taking advantage of the woken CPU during the tracking.
Before I applied the passive update, it was routinely restarting because it kept dying before I could get it charged.
After applying the new update, I haven’t restarted. Last night with passive again: 5.5 hours, start battery 98%, end battery 62%. ~6.5 per hour. I’ll restart the device and see if that changes anything.
The precious message 13%/h relates to before applying the passive update. I don’t think I made that clear.
Would you be willing to do one test with the 5.28 (not passive) again?
We have tested on Ticwatches and the difference was negligible (around 0.1% difference per hour), the Pixel watches can be different in this.
Were the sensors active (HR and SpO2)? What would be the consumption solely for the movement tracking (the sensor might be enabled both in the Sleep app and in the native apps).
I have a Gen 1, which does not have the O2 sensor. Heartbeat was enabled. I’ve run the release version over the course of a week and averaged to ~8.5%/h of battery usage over the course of a week. Highest as 9.6%/h and lowest was 8.2%per hour, median was 8.3. The high seemed to be an outlier and was the only one below 10% after stopping. May be increased battery drain when on battery saver.
Hello @boats big thanks for sharing this… I have tested sleep tracking with many different Wear OS devices over time and never saw a battery drain any close to 8%… usually the battery consumption varies from 1-3% per hour… so IMHO there really is something totally wrong in this particular device… one of the issue may be that Sleep as Android needs to keep a frequent wake lock and some other badly written services or watch faces could take advantage of this… do you think it would be possible to do a following test? Would you please factory reset the watch install only Sleep as Android and see if you still see the consuption?
I’ve done the reset of a Pixel Watch 2 and I’ve reinstalled only Sleep as Android on it, and I still get the excessive battery drain during sleep tracking now. All the watch sensors have always been enabled.
It’s extremely frustrating. I haven’t had a single complete night of data in over a month.
Have there been any new experimental builds of the watch app in the past ~25 days? My phone is managed and can’t install custom APKs on it but I can sideload an app onto the watch with ADB, thankfully. I’m going to try the 5.28 build posted above and try to send results. I’ve already sent a manual bug report from the app.
