Background Refresh Stalls After Charging on watchOS 26

Hello everyone,

I’m a new developer still learning as I go. I’m building a simple watchOS app that tracks Apple Watch battery consumption, records hourly usage data, and uses that information to predict battery life in hours.

I’ve run into an issue where background refresh completely stalls after charging and never recovers, regardless of what I do. The only way to restore normal behavior is to restart the watch.

Background refresh can work fine for days, but if the watch is charging and a scheduled background refresh tries to run during that period, it appears to be deferred—and then remains in that deferred state indefinitely. Even reopening the app or scheduling new refreshes doesn’t recover it.

Has anyone else encountered this behavior? Is there a reliable workaround?

I’ve seen a few reports suggesting that there may be a regression in scheduleBackgroundRefresh() on watchOS 26, where tasks are never delivered after certain states.

Any insights or confirmations would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Would you mind to share the code snippets relevant to your background refresh, how you observed the behavior, and also the mentioned reports that suggested a regression in that regard? Did you try your code on the system versions before watchOS 26 and see it work well?

Best,
——
Ziqiao Chen
 Worldwide Developer Relations.

Background Refresh Stalls After Charging on watchOS 26
 
 
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