Galaxy Watch 4 owners hit with battery drain, unpairing issues after Google Assistant launch

Ben Schoon | May 30 2022 - 6:17 am PT

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 got a huge boost earlier this month as Google Assistant finally arrived, but it seems that has caused some problems. Since Assistant hit the Galaxy Watch 4, users have noticed problems with battery drain and even their watch unpairing itself.

Some Galaxy Watch 4 users see their watch unpair

The bigger of the two issues floating around Galaxy Watch 4 owners right now relates to devices completely unpairing from smartphones. There are many reports around Reddit detailing this issue, and one writer over at Android Police even encountered the problem firsthand.

Those affected by this issue see their Galaxy Watch 4 or Watch 4 Classic unpair from their smartphone entirely, acting almost as if the device was purposefully reset. One user explained that they found that their Galaxy Watch 4 was not connected to their phone when starting a workout. The normal process when a disconnect happens is to check the Galaxy Wearable app on the paired smartphone and reconnect from there. However, this user’s watch had disappeared from the Galaxy Wearable app entirely, and the two devices were no longer connected in any way. The watch itself remained running as usual, but without any way to pair to the phone. Quite a few other Reddit threads have documented similar experiences over the past several days.

Unfortunately, it seems the only solution to this is to reset the watch and start from scratch, as if you were pairing to a new smartphone. This is less than ideal, obviously, given that this means losing some health data, potentially some customizations made to the watch’s software, and also setting up any credit cards in Google Pay or Samsung Pay from scratch again.

It’s not confirmed what the root cause of this issue is, but Google Assistant seems to be a likely culprit. The arrival of Google’s voice companion not only killed Bixby on arrival, but is also the only major change the Galaxy Watch 4 has seen in weeks. The last system update rolled out nearly a month ago, and the Galaxy Wearable app also hasn’t been updated since April.

Google Assistant appears to be a battery killer

An issue more clearly caused by Google Assistant, though, is with battery life. Over the past week it’s become abundantly clear that Assistant is a battery hog on the Galaxy Watch 4, causing major battery drain on the already not-so-impressive endurance of Samsung’s watch.

The Verge was quick to note on launch day that initial testing saw the battery drain by 20% in as little as two hours, with the Apple Watch draining a mere 8% with the same settings applied to Siri. Zachary Wander, a friend of the site, noted on Twitter that Google Assistant ate up around 20% of his battery over the course of six hours of normal use, and was second only to the display in its power consumption.

That's not good pic.twitter.com/TxKcjshIct
— Zachary Wander @wander1236@androiddev.social (@Wander1236) May 25, 2022

Luckily, there’s a more clear-cut solution to this problem. The culprit for Google Assistant battery drain, at least in this quantity, is with the “Hey Google” voice activation. Turning that option off seems to dramatically improve how the Assistant uses battery, which is no surprise given that was a common problem on Wear OS 2 as well.

Google, to its credit, does explicitly say that this will have increased battery drain during setup (where the feature can be enabled, or skipped). Personally, I skipped “Hey Google” when my Watch 4 was getting Assistant and my battery life hasn’t changed at all.

What’s the solution?

Right now, it seems both of these issues are going to require intervention from Google and Samsung to properly address. So far, neither company seems to have acknowledged these problems, but that’s not especially surprising seeing as we’re in the midst of a holiday weekend.