What you need to know
- OnePlus rolled out Wear OS 5 to Watch 2 and 2R units in the last week of December 2025, though only in some territories like India.
- Users who received the update have reported serious battery drain, cutting the 3-day estimate down to 1–2 days.
- OnePlus originally promised the update in Q3 2025 before shifting its window to Q4 2025.
- OnePlus's version of Wear OS 5 mostly includes stock updates like Google app improvements and animation changes.
Like a college student emailing their assignment to the professor at 11:59 p.m., OnePlus rolled out its Wear OS 5 update to some OnePlus Watch 2 and 2R users on December 29, sneaking under their self-imposed end-of-year deadline. And as you might expect, this last-minute update has been causing problems since then.
The OnePlus Watch 2 and Watch 2R, both released in 2024 running Wear OS 4, were originally supposed to receive Wear OS 5 between July and September 2025; only after Android Authority asked about the delay in October did the company say the update would arrive "in the near future."
Now, some OnePlus Watch owners have received the update, though not everyone; my U.S.-based OnePlus Watch 2R, for example, still shows Wear OS 4 and the May 2025 security update. But this might be a blessing in disguise, given the update's effect.
This Reddit thread and several OnePlus forum posts (here, here, and here) have mentioned that the update is causing severe battery drain. The Watch 2 and 2R regularly lasted about three days in smart mode before the update; now, some users say it won't last a full day, even after trying factory resets and other fixes.
"I'm utterly heartbroken and frustrated with the drastic battery drain issue plaguing my OnePlus Watch 2 following the Wear OS 5 update," says one user. "My OnePlus Watch 2 now plummets from full charge at 1:00 PM to a critical 10% by 11:00 PM on light usage."
"Earlier I used to get 2.5 days easily with most settings on (at least 2 days)... Now barely getting 1 day," says another user. Someone responded that his drain wasn't quite as bad, but that he'd gone from 3–4 days before to "a strict 2 days" now.
Several users point to specific apps causing the drain, like the Weather app, Play Store, or "Wear OS" itself, but the variety suggests this is a system-wide issue rather than one app causing problems.
What makes this update especially frustrating to users is that stock Wear OS 5 is (A) a very subtle update with few notable changes and (B) supposed to make Wear OS run more efficiently, as it did on Pixel and Galaxy Watches. The OnePlus Watch 3 has run this version since April with no issues, making this unoptimized update on last-gen models disappointing to see.
Any brand can push a buggy update, but two weeks later, I'd have expected OnePlus to either roll it back or announce a timetable for fixes. Instead, OnePlus hasn't made any official announcement, from what we've seen. My colleague reached out to OnePlus about the update a few days ago, but we've yet to hear back.
Having recommended the OnePlus Watch 2R as my best budget Android smartwatch pick, mostly on the strength of its battery life, this update is deeply concerning to me. OnePlus needs to prove that its promise of two Wear OS updates and three years of security updates isn't just empty rhetoric, and that it'll properly support these watches.
As it is, it's notable that the recent OnePlus Watch Lite skipped Wear OS entirely, using a proprietary RTOS like the original OnePlus Watch.
