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Ask HN: What makes Wear OS watches and Apple watches run out of battery quickly?

1 points by ayumu722 ↗ HN
I own a Mi Watch, and by deactivating some features, it can last me about a month on a single charge, I am wondering why Apple and Google can't achieve such autonomy with their operating systems, what makes their software consume more battery than Xiaomi's software ?

2 comments

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navjack27
What do you deactivate? What do you use it for?

With my wear OS watch I love being able to passively track my steps and constantly gauge by blood oxygen level and heart rate and also I guess the increased GPS accuracy is nice even though I don't really go anywhere but I could turn that off if I want to. I also use it to do enhanced sleep tracking. So pretty much every sensor is always going on mine along with the Bluetooth to communicate with the phone. I also have the display always on and the display goes to a low power mode that's always on that turns everything into like one bit black and white. And I leave the display on the lowest brightness when I'm inside and I turn it up I guess to the max when I'm outside.

I get about 2 days of charge before it gets low enough that I gotta plug it in.

If I wanted a watch that was a just a watch I would just buy a watch and not a smartwatch and then disable all of the smart features.

ayumu722
I deactivate always on display, raise the wrist to turn it on, and automatic workout detection. If I keep all these features on I get about a week of battery life, the blood oxygen feature in it is on demand, it doesn't run all the time, it runs a test only when you ask for one, this may give it some advantage compared to your watch, but the rest is the same, the heart rate sensor runs all the time, it's connected to my phone, and displays all the notifications that I get in it, and at night it tracks my sleep, the problem with the other watches is that even when you deactivate a lot of features, you don't get a significant boost in battery life, why? is it because the OS is bigger and more complex?