Google’s latest lineup of Pixel devices was announced just a few days ago during its I/O 2023 conference. Although the Pixel Fold turned out to be a disappointment in our early impressions, the Pixel Tablet, as well as the standard Pixel 7 and 7a, are quite impressive. In fact, we have also talked in length about how the lines between the latter two handsets are getting blurry, and it’s difficult to choose between one or the other.
Recently, several Pixel users began reporting issues related to excessive and unexpected battery drainage on their handsets following the installation of a Google app update. Numerous threads were spun up on Reddit and Google’s support forums, with customers complaining about their hardware becoming too hot to touch and losing battery life at up to twice the normal rate. Battery drain reports indicated that the Google app was the culprit, with the tech giant later acknowledging the issue on its support forums too.
Fortunately, Google has now rolled out a server-side fix to the Google app to patch the problem. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company confirmed that the issue was affecting a “subset of Android devices” and that with the latest update, battery life should return to normal:
A recent Google App backend change unintentionally resulted in a subset of Android devices experiencing accelerated battery drain. We rolled out a fix shortly after becoming aware of the issue, and impacted users should see their devices return to normal behavior immediately. This fix does not require an app update.
As can be seen in the statement above, you won’t see an app or operating system update on your Pixel device. Instead, the fix has been deployed on Google’s servers and has already silently rolled out to affected users. Google can control numerous feature flags and other features of the Google app via server-side changes, so it’s likely that this is how it was able to fix the problem.
Google did not dive into the details regarding what exactly triggered this battery drain, but Pixel customers can probably rest easy now knowing that the battery drain problem on their handset should be immediately resolved.