If your Pixel’s battery has been draining quickly of late, we may now know the cause.
Ever since the March Pixel update, some Google Pixel phone users have been reporting an excessive degree of battery drain.
Over on Reddit and on Google’s support forums, users of various Google phones – including the Pixel 10 Pro, the Pixel 10 and the Pixel 7 Pro – are piping up with stories of their phones dying by dinner time.
Anyron Copeman / Foundry
What’s the problem?
Thankfully, one Redditor appears to have identified the culprit. Apparently (via Android Police), the March update introduced a nasty bug that prevents some Pixel CPUs from entering what’s known as Deep Doze.
This is the background state that sends your phone into an energy-efficient idle mode, muting background applications and reducing overall performance levels until they’re actually needed.
The user has noted that affected Pixel phones are getting stuck in an infinitely looping process that initiates four times per second. Not the most efficient use of your phone’s limited battery capacity, as you can imagine.
Identifying the issue is one thing, of course, solving it is another. Unfortunately, there’s no simple workaround available right now. Google itself hasn’t even acknowledged the bug as yet, so the advice is to upvote the original defect request on the company’s Issue Tracker and draw some attention to the problem.
Google has since rolled out the April Pixel update, which is predominantly aimed at squashing bugs. This bug, however, hasn’t been addressed, so we’ll need to be patient for now.
Maybe in the May Pixel update, eh?
