There’s only one thing I despise about modern Wear OS smartwatches, and it’s battery life. While brands like OnePlus have managed to squeeze multi-day battery life out of their Wear OS watches, Google Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch models still require daily charging. The easiest time to charge is overnight, but by placing a smartwatch on its charger instead of keeping it on your wrist, you give up sleep tracking.
Luckily, there are ways to extend the battery life of your Wear OS smartwatch. By tweaking a few settings and disabling the features you don’t need, you can make your watch run longer between charges. I own a Galaxy Watch 8, and I change these five settings to avoid charging overnight.
Disable the always-on display
Change wake and timeout settings for more savings
The easiest way to prolong your smartwatch’s battery life is to disable the always-on display. I enjoy keeping the always-on display active on my smartwatches, especially the Apple Watch Ultra 4 that lives on my wrist. It makes glancing at the time or live workout stats easier, but the simple fact is that the always-on display feature drains your battery faster. I can accept that trade-off on smartwatches like the Apple Watch Ultra 4, but on my smaller Galaxy Watch 8, it consumes too much battery.
When the always-on display is active, it sips battery slowly by dimming the brightness, tweaking the watch face colors, and lowering the refresh rate. This helps AOD consume less battery, but it’s still using more charge than if the display was fully off. To save battery in a pinch, swipe down from the top of your Galaxy Watch to reveal the quick settings panel. Then, tap the watch icon to disable the always-on display.
This toggle is handy for enabling and disabling the always-on display on a case-by-case basis, but there’s a way to manage the feature in your Galaxy Watch settings as well. Navigate to Settings → Display → Always On Display and flip the toggle off. It’s simple and obvious for a good reason — turning off AOD is the best way to extend the battery life of your Galaxy Watch.
Turn off Wi-Fi connectivity
Bluetooth is enough to maintain a phone connection
In addition to Bluetooth, smartwatches have Wi-Fi antennas that can connect directly to wireless networks. There’s a Remote Connection feature that helps your Galaxy Watch connect to your phone when the two devices are out of Bluetooth’s range, requiring only both devices to have an active internet connection. However, Bluetooth is the primary link between your watch and phone. You can safely turn off Wi-Fi on your Galaxy Watch without losing smartphone connection and health data sync.
A redundant Wi-Fi connection wastes battery life with little benefit, but the real concern is the time your Galaxy Watch spends looking for a known Wi-Fi network. When you’re moving throughout your day in a place without any saved Wi-Fi networks, your Galaxy Watch is still using power to probe for possible connections. This represents a marginal battery drain overall, but no one likes leaving possible battery life on the table.
To turn off Wi-Fi on your Galaxy Watch, navigate to Settings → Connections → Wi-Fi and flip the toggle off. There’s a quick settings toggle for Wi-Fi, but tapping it only temporarily disconnects your watch. To fully turn it off, you need to flip the toggle in the Galaxy Watch settings app.
Disable wake words
No need to keep Gemini or Bixby always listening
Digital assistants like Gemini or Bixby can help you control your watch hands-free. Saying “Hey Google” to trigger Gemini is convenient, but this feature is draining your Galaxy Watch’s battery life. Your smartwatch is always listening for the wake word or phrase, which in this case is “Hey Google.” This feature is also called voice wake-up, and it’s not the best way to activate Gemini or Bixby.
Instead, disabling voice wake-up and using a physical button press to trigger your digital assistant is the smarter method. Pressing a button to activate Gemini doesn’t waste battery, but your Galaxy Watch listening for a wake word all day certainly does. To turn this feature off, navigate to Settings → Google → Assistant → Hey Google to disable voice wake-up. You may be prompted to complete the action on your phone, but the battery savings will make the process worth your time.
Lower brightness and vibration strength
The less the screen and motor have to work, the better
Just like your phone, your Galaxy Watch has a brightness setting that can be lowered to save battery. If you haven’t enabled it yet, flipping the toggle beside Adaptive Brightness — found by navigating to Settings -> Display -> Adaptive Brightness — is a fair compromise. It dynamically adjusts the watch’s brightness based on your environment’s ambient lighting conditions. When you need the extra brightness for peak visibility, it’s there. When you don’t, the screen brightness automatically lowers to preserve power.
Of course, to save even more charge, you can disable Adaptive Brightness and set a manual low brightness setting. Beware, you may find yourself needing to crank up the brightness manually if you set a custom brightness setting, depending on the lighting conditions.
Another way to get longer runtimes out of your Galaxy Watch is to lower its vibration intensity. There are two options: Light and Strong. The latter makes its presence known on your wrist, but uses more battery. If you’d rather be notified by your Galaxy Watch more gently, you can switch the setting to Light and save battery in the process.
To do so, navigate to Settings → Sounds and vibration → Vibration → Vibration intensity and choose Light. Selecting a Vibration duration of Short on this page may also improve battery life.
Turn on power-saving mode
Limit health features to make your battery last longer
Finally, turning on Power-saving mode can seriously extend your Galaxy Watch’s battery life. By navigating to Settings → Battery → Power saving on your Galaxy Watch, you’ll see an estimate of how long your smartwatch will last with and without power-saving mode enabled. In some cases, turning the feature on may prolong your Galaxy Watch’s runtime by a matter of days, not hours.
By default, power-saving mode limits health tracking and GPS monitoring to save battery, but you can manage some of these cuts manually with the Limit health features toggle. You can quickly turn on power-saving mode by tapping the battery icon in the quick settings panel. It does limit or outright disable some of your Galaxy Watch’s best features, so you should only turn it on when you need battery life most.
Enable watch only mode as a last resort
There’s a fine line between extending your Galaxy Watch’s battery life and disabling the features that make it smart in the first place. On the extreme side, there’s a watch-only mode that turns off almost everything to provide weeks-long battery life. However, it should only be used as a last resort. By changing these settings on your Galaxy Watch, you can save battery life without losing much of its utility.