Samsung Gear S3 Frontier Battery Drain Fix – Easy

I have had the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier for a few years now and it has been a fantastic smartwatch. The only problem I started to have was the battery at times would drain very fast. Usually, within a day it would be dead flat.

But other times it would last 2-3 days no problem. It was not consistent, something was going on. It was either hardware related or software.

A quick search online showed that many people are having the same issue and some were looking to replace the battery. In this post, I will show you how to fix your Samsung Gear S3 Frontier battery draining too fast with just a software reset.

Samsung Gear S3 battery drain fix

For some reason, my Gear S3 smartwatch would get itself into a software loop. Something was going on in the background and it was slowing it down and causing massive battery drain.

It was probably caused by a watch update or a corrupted watch face/application.

Make sure you are on the latest update by going to your Gear Wearable App Home > Watch software update.

If you are on the latest update then the following method worked for me.

Hard Reset the Frontier smart watch.

Firstly, make sure your watch is fully charged as this process may take 1/2 hour or more. You can do a Hard Reset either via the Gear App or via the Gear watch. The following steps are using the gear application.

To reset the Samsung watch S3 first go to your Gear Galaxy Wear application on your smartphone and back up your data. This is found under:

Home > Account and Backup > Backup and restore > Back up data. (will take a few minutes)

Once you have done a backup of all of your data to the cloud you can then restore the watch back to factory defaults.

Go to Home > About Watch > Reset.

Warning this will erase all apps, user info, and resets the watch. Make sure you have done a backup.

Resync the Gear S3 smart watch

Your Samsung Gear S3 wearable is now fresh and new. You will have to do the following to restore functionality.

• Connect to Bluetooth on your phone or tablet.
• Restore your data and applications.
• Update your smartwatch.
• Reload any apps that require special permissions like Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and credit cards.
• Set your favorite watch face.
• Enjoy your new fresh Samsung Gear S3 Frontier without the battery drain issues.

Turn off unused notifications and apps.

1. Make sure all apps are updated.

2. On your smartphone, go to Galaxy Wearable > About Gear > Update Gear Software. : Turn off “Download updates automatically”

3. Go to Notifications > Manage Notifications: Turn off everything except your most essential apps. Also turn off all buttons on the Notifications screen except Show only while wearing Gear, Auto show details, and Notification indicator

4. Make sure you have plenty of storage left. I have over 1Gb

5. I did not delete any of my watch faces. (I have over 10 paid and free watch faces)

6.  Go to the Samsung Health application and remove any functions or notifications that you don’t really use.

7. Go to About Gear and Back up settings

8. After the backup is complete, Power down your watch and reboot.

Calibrating Samsung Gear S3 Frontier Battery

Your watch has some smart software installed that will auto-calibrate the battery. But you must first fully charge the Gear S3 battery and then discharge it to around 10%.

Do this a few times with a full charge and full discharge cycle to get the Gear S3 frontier battery calibrated properly.

Depending on usage you should get around 2-3 days of basic use.

Conclusion

The above steps helped me fix my Samsung Gear S3 Frontier battery drain overnight. I first thought that the battery was failing and would need a replacement. But it just looks like there was some software loop going on.

Since I have completed the Gear S3 hard reset and restore my watch has been performing perfectly with no battery drain issues for the past 3 months.

I am beginning to see a pattern here with Samsung. My child’s old Galaxy Tab3 tablet was not charging so I have to strip it down to hard reset it. Luckily the Gear S3 watch can do a software reset.

Hopefully, this helps someone else and you and start using your Samsung smartwatch again.