Google’s Apps Drain Your Battery, and the Fix Favors Pixel 10

Five of Google’s own apps, YouTube, Chrome, Maps, Gmail and Home, rank among the biggest drains on a phone’s battery life, according to testing by BGR. Google has one real software fix for that problem, and it currently ships on four Pixel phones.

Everyone else is left toggling settings by hand while phone makers race to outsize the problem with bigger cells. The OnePlus 15 launched this fall with a 7,300 mAh battery, and the global average has climbed by hundreds of milliamp hours in a single year. Bigger batteries do not fix what makes these five apps such steady drains in the first place.

Five Google Apps, One Battery Problem

The culprits are apps most Android and iPhone owners open every day without a second thought. Each one leans on a different combination of the same battery-hungry ingredients: constant network requests, an always-on screen, GPS, or a processor working overtime to decode video and sync data in the background.

All five share one universal lever, too. Android’s Settings app has an Allow Background Usage toggle buried under each app’s battery usage page, and iPhone’s equivalent is Background App Refresh in Settings. Turning either off stops an app from working while it sits closed, which is the single biggest reason any of these five drains a phone overnight.

Why the Most Useful Features Are the Worst Offenders

There is a pattern underneath all five apps, and it is not an accident. YouTube needs to keep streaming to work. Gmail needs to keep syncing to deliver a notification the instant an email lands. Google Home needs to know, at all times, whether a phone is near the house, which is why presence sensing requires location access set to always allow rather than only while the app is open.

Speaking to ZDNet, Thomas Davy, chief executive and co-founder of the cloud optimization firm Cloud ExMachina, named smart home apps as one of the worst battery offenders on a phone. He said that, like streaming apps, smart home apps have to keep syncing with the cloud, and that constant back-and-forth is what chews through a battery over the course of a day.

Every one of these features is also the reason people install the app. Turn-by-turn navigation needs the screen on. Instant email needs a live connection. A smart home app that only checked in once an hour would miss the point of automation entirely. The battery cost is not a bug sitting next to the feature. It is the feature.

Bigger Batteries Are the Industry’s Answer

Phone makers have mostly responded to software that will not get leaner by making batteries that hold more. The OnePlus 15 arrived with a 7,300 mAh cell built around silicon carbon chemistry, its 7,300 mAh Glacier Battery more than 20 percent larger than the capacity in its predecessor.

That single phone is part of a much bigger shift. Counterpoint Research, a firm that tracks global handset shipments, found that six of the ten best-selling 6,000-mAh-plus phones sold in January 2026 used silicon-carbon cells, a battery chemistry Chinese brands adopted well before anyone else.

• 5,291 mAh is the global average smartphone battery capacity Counterpoint recorded in January 2026, the sharpest year-over-year jump since late 2021.
• 29% of phones sold that month packed 6,000 mAh or larger batteries, nearly triple the roughly 10% share a year earlier.
• 8,300 mAh powers the Honor X70 5G, the largest cell among January’s best-selling phones.

That does not change how much power YouTube or Gmail actually pulls per hour of use. It just buys more hours before the drain is felt.

Why Doesn’t Every Android Phone Get This Fix?

Google built Power Saving Mode specifically for the Pixel 10 line’s hardware and software, and as of this year it has not extended the feature to any other Android phone or to iPhone, even though Google Maps runs on both. Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL and Pixel 10 Pro Fold are the only four models that get it, and it is turned on by default.

The feature arrived through Google’s November 2025 Pixel feature drop and widened its rollout later that month. It works like this:

1. Turn the setting on once under Google Maps’ Profile, then Settings, then Navigation, under Driving Options.
2. Start turn-by-turn driving navigation as usual.
3. Press the phone’s power button mid-drive to strip the screen to a monochrome map that keeps only the route line visible.
4. The pared-down view shows just the next turn and the estimated arrival time.
5. Google says the mode can add up to four hours of battery life on a single charge, and it also works on the lock screen.

Coverage of the rollout was blunt about what that exclusivity means in practice: the feature was not coming to most Android phones. Google Maps is installed on well over a billion devices that are not Pixel 10s, and none of them get the same trick.

Chinese Brands and Pixel Buyers Come Out Ahead

Line up the numbers and the winners are easy to spot. Chinese OEMs, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo and OnePlus among them, pushed silicon-carbon batteries into the mainstream first and now dominate the list of phones with the biggest cells. Pixel 10 buyers, meanwhile, are the only Android owners with a Google-built software fix for the exact apps Google itself made.

Premium buyers on other platforms fare worse by this measure. Counterpoint’s tracking puts the iPhone 17 Pro Max at roughly 4,823 mAh and the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra at about 5,000 mAh, both under the 5,291 mAh global average despite their flagship price tags. Apple has never published a raw capacity figure and instead promotes battery life estimates, but the underlying cell in its most expensive phone is smaller than what a mid-range Chinese phone now ships with as standard.

That leaves the largest group of all, the enormous number of Android phones running older chipsets and stock-sized batteries, without either advantage. Those owners get neither the silicon-carbon capacity boost nor the Pixel-exclusive software patch, just the same five apps quietly working through a charge in the background.

The Settings Worth Changing Today

The fastest fix touches every one of the five apps the same way. On Android, open Settings, then Apps, then the app in question, then App Battery Usage, and turn off Allow Background Usage. On iPhone, open Settings, then Apps, then the app, and turn off Background App Refresh.

From there, the app-specific tweaks in the table above do the rest: killing YouTube’s autoplay previews, turning off Chrome’s page preloading, switching Google Home’s location permission to never, and downloading Maps routes for offline use before a long drive. None of these require new hardware or a Pixel phone.

Google has not said whether Power Saving Mode will expand beyond the Pixel 10 line.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Google Maps’ Power Saving Mode coming to other Android phones?

Not as of this year. Google built the feature for the Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL and Pixel 10 Pro Fold specifically, rolling it out through a November 2025 Pixel feature drop, and has not announced a broader Android or iPhone version.

How much extra battery life does Power Saving Mode actually add?

Google says the feature can add up to four hours of battery life during driving navigation, though it only works in portrait orientation and driving mode, not walking or biking directions, so the real-world gain depends on how a trip is being tracked.

Why did average smartphone battery capacity jump so much in 2026?

Counterpoint Research traces most of the gain to silicon-carbon battery cells, which pack more capacity into the same physical size. Chinese brands including Honor, Xiaomi and OnePlus adopted the technology first, which is why the global average climbed by about 400 mAh in a single year, the sharpest rise since late 2021.

Does iPhone have the same background refresh fix as Android for these apps?

Yes. Every one of the five apps offers a matching toggle on both platforms, Allow Background Usage on Android and Background App Refresh on iPhone, and switching it off stops the app from syncing or checking for updates while it sits unopened.

Does Google Home’s presence sensing work without constant location access?

No. Presence sensing needs the Google Home app to have location permission set to always allow, since that is how it detects whether a phone, and its owner, is home or away to trigger automations. Switching location access to never stops the drain but also turns off that automatic detection.

Does a bigger battery like the OnePlus 15’s fix the underlying drain problem?

A larger cell mainly buys time before the drain becomes noticeable. The same background syncing, GPS use and video decoding still consume power at about the same rate, so a 7,300 mAh battery just delays the moment someone reaches for a charger.