TIL my phone battery drain was a rogue app, not old age

My Pixel 5 was dying by 3 PM every day for like 2 weeks, so I was about to buy a $60 replacement battery. Then a friend asked me to check the battery stats page, and I saw Google Photos running in the background for 14 hours straight. Turns out it was stuck trying to sync a giant 4K video, and killing that process gave me back a full day of charge. I changed my backup settings to wifi only and turned off background data for the app, which fixed it completely. Anyone else had a specific app silently murdering their battery, or is it just me?

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uma_baker998d ago

Google Photos is such a sneaky one for this too, because it never tells you it is stuck, it just sits there quietly chewing through your battery like it is doing you a favor. What got me was finding out you can go into the app itself and limit background sync even more than the system settings let you, like telling it to only back up when charging AND on wifi. That combo basically saved my old phone from the recycle bin (well, mostly, the battery was still kinda worn out). The bigger lesson here is that checking that battery stats page should be step one before anyone drops money on a new battery, because half the time it is just one dumb app misbehaving.

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