Google Pixel's battery problems are unforgivable after 10 years

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s an issue with the Pixel’s battery life. No, not that issue. Or that issue. Or that one even. Or any of the, uh, many, many other battery issues. No, this time it’s the fact that the March update has caused excessive battery drain on Pixels, with 75% of 2,600+ voters surveyed saying they’ve noticed it. Google has acknowledged the issue, which affects the phone’s ability to enter a Deep Doze state, and is supposedly working on fixing it.

All good, right? Except that I’m honestly tired of hearing about Pixels and battery issues. It’s been 10 years, we’ve gone through everything from Qualcomm Snapdragon to Google Tensor processors, from smaller batteries to larger ones, from Android 7.1 Nougat to Android 16, and there’s always an issue with the Pixel battery. It’s high time Google actually took this seriously.

Pixel battery woes are as inevitable as the air we breathe

Before I talk about any historic battery issues, I’d like to focus on the present. At Android Authority, many of us own a Google Pixel 10 series phone and use it as our daily driver. Being on top of what Google is cooking up for Pixels and Android is pretty much a requirement of the job. And yet all of us have had questionable experiences with the phones’ battery life.

Robert has done several tests to prove that the Pixel 10 Pro XL tends to use way more power over 4G than Wi-Fi, compared to other phones (and even the Pixel 9 Pro XL). This came after his earlier battery life assessment, where he’d noticed that there wasn’t as much of an improvement as Google had promised with Tensor G5 compared to the G4.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that even while putting aside the data and Wi-Fi variables, my Pixel 10 Pro XL’s battery life has been very confusing and unreliable. There are days when I can get over seven hours of screen-on time, easily, and days when it’s down to 20% after just four hours of use, all while mostly using the same apps. When it’s great, I feel like I can do almost anything on my phone and it’ll simply sip battery, but when it isn’t, I can almost see the percentages drop with every few minutes of screen time.

Check the two sets of screenshots below. In one of them, I managed to eke out seven hours of screen time before the battery saver mode got triggered at 19%, whereas in the other, I was down to 26% with less than five hours, all while being at home. For some reason, in the second case, Wi-Fi and data usage were through the roof, though.

It’s this kind of inconsistency that makes the Pixel battery experience so frustrating. When we asked you, our readers, what you thought about the Pixel 10 series’ battery life, the results were pretty telling. 32% of over 5,100 voters said it was great, 30% qualified it as consistently average, 22% as very inconsistent, and 16% as bad all the time.

That’s not a good look, especially on the tenth iteration of your phone — fifth if we only count the Tensor models starting with the Pixel 6 series. We shouldn’t be looking at nearly two out of five users saying the experience is inconsistent or bad. Nor is seeing 30% of users calling it “average” a good look, either, especially considering that the competition has more or less dominated the battery discourse.

Samsung, OnePlus, OPPO, Nothing, and even Apple, to a certain extent (considering its much smaller battery cells), all have had a positive trajectory with battery life on their phones in recent years. Google, though? Every year with every new Pixel, I find myself repeating the same cycle: decent but inconsistent battery life for a couple of months, then mediocre as time goes on. Maybe it’s the modem, maybe it’s the processor, maybe it’s some evil fairy dust, but whatever the reason, five years of Tensor and 10 years of Pixel should’ve been enough to figure this out already.

Google has more battery problems than just inconsistencies

Everything I’ve said so far falls on one side of the balance, while on the other, there’s the entire question around Pixels’ battery longevity and charging cycles. I won’t repeat myself — I’ve already expanded on the battery issues of the Pixel A series. Burning batteries, recalled models, and forced charge throttling aren’t a good look, even on your cheap or midrange phones. But it’s the fact that Google has issued no explanation, no apology, no promise, nothing — just silence — that makes this entire story more suspicious to me.

I’d have loved to know that the company has identified the cause of these problems, and that it’s taken steps so they never occur again, or that this was a temporary problem with one supplier. But alas, this isn’t something Google has given us.

Instead, even the more recent and higher end Pixel 10 series have their batteries force-throttled with the new Battery Health Assistant feature, which gradually reduces the phone’s charging speed and battery charge to “stabilize” performance and aging. In other words, this is Google admitting its battery can’t handle functioning at its full capacity for more than 1,000 cycles, and even starting the restrictions around the 200th cycle. Maybe the new easily-replaceable battery design will fix this? Or maybe not. The sad part is that other brands like Samsung, OnePlus, and OPPO guarantee more than 1,600 or 2,000 cycles at 80% capacity.

Couple this with some random battery drain bugs that keep re-appearing with every few monthly updates, just like the one we’re seeing with the March Drop, and you can see why this is a hot issue for Google. As long as it’s not fixed, the Android Authority team and I will keep pointing out battery issues as a bad asterisk on the company’s excellent Pixel phones’ pedigree.

It’s high time this got looked at more seriously, Google. Stop reaching for silly AI gimmicks and unnecessary extra features, and fix the basics first. I just want a phone that reliably gets me to the end of the day, no matter what I throw at it. I’m pretty sure we all agree this is more important than adding Nano Banana to Maps, for example.