Pixel's battery drain bug ran from March to July. Google says it's fixed, and some owners disagree.

After the March 2026 Pixel Drop, owners started reporting faster battery drain, including while the phone sat idle. Notebookcheck says it reached owners as far back as the Pixel 7. A reader poll reported by Gizmochina found about 76 percent of respondents saw more drain after an update.

Owners who dug into it pointed to phones that never entered Deep Doze, the mode that puts the processor to sleep when the screen is off. Digit reported in April that Google had confirmed the problem and was working on a fix. BGR says Google never published an official explanation of the cause.

April’s update came with a separate wave of lag and stutter reports, mostly from Pixel 8 and 9 owners. The May update fixed slow wireless charging between 75 and 80 percent and a camera freeze, but nothing for the idle drain.

In late July, Google marked the bug fixed on its public issue tracker. It said the fix shipped in the July update for the Pixel 9 and Pixel 10, with the 8a and 9a due in September. The same BGR report says owners were already posting that the drain was still there, and that the July release notes did not mention the fix.

This was not the first time Doze broke on a Pixel. BGR says Android 16 broke it too.

Google promises seven years of updates on recent Pixels. I think that promise is worth what the updates do to the phone. For owners who hit this bug, the March update caused the problem, the fix took until July, and the release notes did not say it was in there. That is why I would not treat seven years as a selling point on its own.

Corrected 4 November 2026. The first version of this piece said Google had not acknowledged the bug and did not mention the July fix. It also included claims about Apple and Samsung and a Reddit thread that we could not source, and those have been removed.