My first Apple Watch was Series 4 paired with the first generation iPhone SE. A phenomenal combination.
I slowly started to leave the iPhone and dedicate all the interaction to the watch: calls, messages, emails, social networks, and others, all managed by this small device. The battery is certainly not the best compared to other competitors, but I was able to safely do two full days. My use, in addition to constantly using the watch, also included streaming music, podcasts, navigation, and an hour or two of physical activity with the heart rate monitor always on.
Everything is going well until one day the Apple Watch’s battery started to drain constantly for no reason. If I had 100% battery, after one hour it was 85% or worse.
Not only that, the iPhone had the same problem. It managed to lose more than half of its battery during about twenty minutes in the car playing music downloaded locally.
So began my vortex into oblivion, between assistance, restorations, and much other uselessness that have not solved anything. I started looking for my problem on Google and realized that on Reddit I’m not the only one. I decided to follow some “guides” present, but nothing. Same thing for the official guides of Apple.
In the end, I gave up and did what every normal person had to do from the start, go to the Apple Store. All good what ends well, but no.
Genius ran its tests and the Apple Watch’s battery was perfectly healthy without any problems and invited me to wait for subsequent updates that could fix the problem. All this’s absolute nonsense, if I’m told to wait for an update to fix my problem, it means that this problem is common to everyone who has the same version of the system as me.
So I decided to see through XCode what caused all that battery drain to the Apple Watch. I realized there was a TrustedPeersHelper process that was always consuming a high amount of CPU. So I tried to find out if this process was also present in my Mac and the process was not only present but consuming 30-80% of the CPU, also its CPU Time was totally out of order, almost as if the process was running forever. Looking for some more information on Reddit I saw that a user had the same problem as me with this process and the continuous consumption of his devices. In this case, the user solved it by creating a new Apple ID and restoring all his devices.
In my case, creating a new Apple ID meant going crazy because I use every single service present. So I kept looking up MacRumors where a user went through a series of steps that solved all these problems raised by the evil process.
Turn off all iOS devices. In my case, iPhone and Apple Watch.
Leave all devices like iMac, MacBook and others turned on. From one of these, open Activity monitor, look for the process TrustedPeersHelper, click on the information icon, and go to Open Files and Ports. Save GUID for the path to the SQLLite keychain DB.
Close all open applications. Open the terminal and type:
cd ~/Library/Keychains/<GUID>
mkdir backup
mv ~/Library/Keychains/<GUID>/com.apple.security.keychain-defaultContext.TrustedPeersHelper.{db,db-shm,db-wal} backup/
tpctl reset
Turn off all Macs.
Just turn on a Mac, log in, and log back into the iCloud account in System Preferences.
Check that there aren’t associated devices that you no longer use or are old.
Restart your Mac and wait for a couple of minutes.
Do the same process with any other Macs you have. So start a Mac, log in and re-authenticated in iCould, shut it down, and wait a few minutes. Then turn on another Mac and so on. In the end, you will have all the devices turned off.
Turn on the iOS devices one by one, first the iPhone and then the Apple Watch.
Reset the Apple Watch and set it up as a new device.
After all these steps I went to check the TrustedPeersHelper process again and it used 0% CPU on Mac and after a few weeks it went up very little.
The battery of the iPhone and Apple Watch are all back to normal without any more problems!