The Pixel Watch desperately needs an automated bedtime mode

Google’s claimed 24 hours of battery life on the Pixel Watch hasn’t been easy to achieve for everyone, but if you want to raise your odds of hitting this full-day mark, you have to enable bedtime mode when you go to sleep.

Bedtime mode turns off the constantly-on display and disables notifications (only alarms and priority/repeater callers can vibrate or ring your wrist while still being on). tracking your sleep. The reduced disturbances are essential when you’re trying to rest, but they also have the positive side effect of using less battery.

On average, a full night’s sleep can drain 30-40% from the Pixel Watch’s battery without bedtime mode enabled. If the Pixel Watch is turned on, this number drops to between 30-40% and 15-20%. The difference is what makes it possible to stretch the Pixel Watch’s battery life on one charge to reach the coveted 24 hours.

The problem with bedtime mode, though, is that it’s a manual setting. Every night, you have to remember to enable it, or else the battery on your watch will drop much faster — and your sleep might be interrupted by some useless notification. I know this all too well because in the month that I’ve been using the Pixel Watch, I’ve made this mistake a couple of nights. It’s not ideal to wake up to a battery-drained watch and have to rethink my charging plan.

What’s nonsensical is that I have to tap a button to tell my smartwatch I’m sleeping, the same smartwatch that’s supposed to know when I’m awake and when I’m sleeping.

It’s also absurd that the watch’s bedtime mode is completely separate from bedtime mode on Android phones — the one you can enable in Digital Wellbeing In the default Clock app. In an ecosystem, two products from the same family are supposed to talk to each other but, right now, the Pixel Watch doesn’t know when my Pixel is in bedtime mode. And vice versa.

This problem could be solved by an automated bedtime mode. A simple user-chosen start and end time setting would be the most basic solution, but I’m sure Google and FitbitWith all their AI- and metrics-savvy, they can find a smarter way of implementing it.

Maybe they could show a notification before bedtime mode is set to start and let you snooze it if you’re still awake and active. Or they could wait until the Fitbit sensors detect that you’re really sleeping within the preset timeframe and only enable bedtime mode then. They could also use multiple factors, such as your activity or whether your phone is in bedtime modes to trigger it on your watch. And when Fitbit knows you’re awake in the morning, it can disable bedtime mode on both watch and phone — or ask you if it should.

I hope Google will implement this feature in one of its quarterly Feature Drop updates. This is a simple way to ensure that anyone using the Pixel Watch as a smartwatch or health tracker can use their watch throughout the day.