Bad news emerged this morning for Google Pixel phone owners. More specifically, for Google Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro users who have reported increased issues with overheating and rapid battery drain. Only the brand new Pixel 7a was not affected. Google has now responded and launched a patch within a few hours. The update is rolled out on the server side and requires no further action by the user.
Reddit users posted the issue on the Reddit Pixel forum. The affected devices were mostly the Pixel 6 and Pixel 7 series. The Google app seems to be to blame for the strong battery discharge, which showed an unusually high background usage in the battery statistics. Attempts to perform a rollback or reset did not help.
“We have received reports of Android devices becoming overheated and seeing accelerated battery drain. We identified the root cause of the issue being a recent Google app backend change that unintentionally resulted in these issues.
Pixel Community team
We have rolled out a fix that should begin to take effect for impacted users immediately. No user action is needed.”
Google now also identified the Google app as the main cause of the problem, for which there had been a backend change. The new patch from today fixes exactly this problem.
As worded, this issue affected all Android devices and not just the Pixel phones. However, there are no other reports of Android phones from other manufacturers. The Pixel smartphones here in the editorial office were also not affected.
