Pixel battery life has issues with the May 2023 Update

If you’re using a Pixel 6 or Pixel 7 series, you might want to hold off on updating to the May 2023 security patch if you haven’t already, as the update seems to wreak havoc on battery life and heat.

Google Pixel 6, 6 Pro, 6a, Pixel 7, and 7 Pro owners have reported issues with their phones overheating and battery draining exceptionally quickly after the May 2023 update. In some cases, this cuts battery life in half, if not worse, The phone gets hot to the touch.

User reports of these problems started appearing first around May 6thjust days after the update was released, and has persisted at that time ever since.

Another potentially related issue seems to be coming from the Google app, which seems to be running in the background and using system resources to the point of overheating the phone as well as draining the battery life. Some affected users have it I talked on reddit, saying that the issue appears in both the current stable and beta versions of the Google app. Some have also found that the “Android System Intelligence” app is showing high battery usage in the system settings.

Both issues seem to be fairly common, with hundreds of comments across many Reddit threads And Google support forums regarding this issue. Personally, the Pixel 7 Pro doesn’t seem to take a beating, though I’ve seen some epically Bad battery life late last week right after updating to the May patch, it hasn’t happened again since. Our Pixel 7a had good battery life before installing the May 2023 patch, says our Damien Wilde, but he’s noticed slowdowns since then.

Google has not yet released any public response to the issue, and customer support does not seem to be helpful according to some users who have gone this route. Going back to previous versions of the Google app doesn’t seem to help either.

If your Pixel phone is affected, drop a comment below and let us know.

Thanks Darren!

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