Pixel owners have spent the better part of 2026 watching their phones burn through the battery for no obvious reason. Complaints about the Pixel's battery hit hard following the March 2026 Pixel Feature Drop. While Google never shared an official explanation, the leading theory has always pointed to an issue that kept Pixel phones from hitting Deep Doze – a special power-saving mode built into Android since Android 7.0 Nougat. This mode is intended to help prolong battery life by putting apps and background processes to sleep when they aren't needed. However, if the device is never allowed to enter Deep Doze, battery life will continue to drop.
Now, though, Google claims that it has finally fixed the issue, with the company marking the months-long bug as 'Fixed' on its public issue tracker. The company also says (via Android Authority) that a patch for the bug shipped with the July Pixel update to Pixel 9 and Pixel 10 devices, with the Pixel 8a and Pixel 9a expected to receive it by September. While that sounds like good news on the surface, there is a problem here. Users are already taking to Reddit to complain about the issue persisting.
Users aren't convinced that it is really fixed
While people experiencing the issue after it was supposedly fixed is bad enough, it isn't even the whole story. To make matters worse, there does not appear to be any mention of the idle drain even being addressed in the latest patch notes from the Pixel's July update. This has added additional skepticism to the proposed fix, as it seems like something Google would very clearly advertise in the patch notes.
If you've been lucky enough to avoid this issue, or just haven't realized it's happening, the bug first surfaced not long after the March Pixel update, when a Pixel 9 Pro XL owner posted findings on the Google Issue Tracker. That user traced the problem to one of the subsystems on the device repeatedly failing to enter its prescribed low-power state. This triggered continuous hardware interruptions, which kept the phone's processor from ever reaching its Deep Doze state.
What makes this particular issue especially annoying is that it's not the first time Pixel phones have experienced issues with the Doze system. In fact, Android 16 also broke Doze, and it took a while for Google to get it back working correctly then, too. Unfortunately, with the claimed fix not seeming to have actually made much of a difference to users' devices, Pixel users may need to wait longer to get a break from the annoying idle battery drain that has been plaguing them since March.
Not Google's first bug rodeo
Unfortunately, this isn't the first time a bug has plagued Google Pixel users for an extended period of time. Pixel users continue to wait for a fix for a bug that prevents Pixel phones from calling 911, which has persisted for a couple of years now. Additionally, there are several problems that Google needs to fix with Android 17, and this battery issue is just one of them. While it is likely disappointing for users to be told that this issue is fixed and to continue experiencing it, it is also entirely possible that the problem is much deeper than just the Deep Doze theory that has gained traction over the past few months.
Considering how large the Pixel community has become — and how vocal it can be on Reddit and other platforms — it seems unlikely Google would try to slip one by its users. Sadly, until the company finds the actual fix and pushes it out, users will likely continue to experience rapid battery drain.
