• Off TopicPixel 7

  • Pixel 7 (w/ GOS) - worst battery life of all my phones in the past 20 years

Yo all,
I got a new Pixel7 5 days ago and immedeately put GOS on it. It all was nice and dandy until i realized the abysmal battery life on this phone. It drains 2% in standby without any interaction or significant applications running (WhatsApp and PlayStore). I was floored by this experience - I could watch the battery dwindle 1% per half-hour on stand-by and even more so in on-screen time. This would be by far the worst battery life that I have ever experienced in any phone i possesed over the last 20 years, including a galaxy note 4 with a 3 year old battery, and a 6 years old iPhone SE, both of which I have still laying around.

Since I could not believe what my eyes told me, I reset GrapheneOS to factory defaults - because surely there was some rogue process left from installing/reinstalling/deinstalling/testing apps. Except there was not. With nothing more than WhatsApp and PlayStore running, the phone went down 15% overnight (7h) without having any calls or messages coming in. This is - to put it mildly - disheartening.

So I started to do some research - and here is what I found: The phone itself comes with a 4355mAh battery. According to notebookcheck.com the phone pulls about 0.32 Watts on Standby (link below). I could not find a Voltage rating for the Pixel 7 battery so I assumed the 3.85V of my 3220mAh Li-ion Note4 battery. Now, this leads to a calculation of 16.77Wh of battery capacity. 16.77Wh divided by .32W results in 52.4h. So pretty much around the 2% every hour mark. Unbelievable.

I still find all this hard to believe since, once again, I have never had any phone perform this bad. What is more is that, on average, a li-ion battery is said to last 300-500 charge cycles before it is considered worn out. That would render this phone inpractical to use in little more than one year with normal use.

Can anybody confirm (or better yet debunk) these numbers? There must be people with better battery life on their p7s out there..... right?

Sources:
Battery capacity: https://store.google.com/product/pixel_7_specs
Battery drain: https://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-Google-Pixel-7-Kleineres-Google-Smartphone-ohne-grosse-Kompromisse.663827.0.html
Calculation: https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/mah-to-wh-calculator.html

    The Pixel 7 does seem to consume its battery quicker than the other non-Pixel phones I've previously owned, and this is not specific to GOS. I found that stock Android 13 was roughly the same.

    I know that the display hardware is partially to blame, as there are detailed reviews which highlight the higher than average power consumption of the screen. I do wonder if the Pixel's coprocessor is partially to blame as well, since none of the other Android phones I've owned have had one.

    For me, this is a trade-off I'm willing to take in order to have a highly secure and privacy-respecting phone. The same goes for all of the other relatively minor annoyances I've encountered from AOSP.

    warnod If it helps with benchmarking, I'm using a pixel 6a with GrapheneOS, and am going through 2 1/2 - 3 full days of (admittedly light) use before reaching the 30% battery mark and recharging. No social media apps, mainly good ol' fashioned voice calls, texts through Signal, 15 min each morning of web browsing, geometric weather, and that's mostly it on an everyday basis. Couple banking apps, Telegram, and of course camera usage on an occasional basis.

        Shendai I run the lower resolution display on my P7 Pro as it may conserve battery a bit. Unlikely to discern the visual difference either.

          warnod I sold my pixel 7 because of battery drain. Bought myself a used pixel 4a and it doesn't have this problem. I might be wrong, but after troubleshooting a bit and checking google's issuetracker i came to a conclusion that it's because of exynos and no update will fix it (hence the selling). Will hope google releases something better or gos moves to another hardware in this short year of support i have lol

              vvdn What do you mean with "Exynos"? Neither of those Pixels have an Exynos processor AFAIK...

                  alex_herrero
                  vvdn might meant Tensor chips, developed by Samsung and produced in their facilities. Tensor chips have one of the worse power efficiency among the modern chips AFAIK.

                    Purely anecdotal, but I am getting well over 1 day battery life out of my month-old P7P. running GrapheneOS since I first powered it up and went through the initial unlocking.

                    My cellular modem (in 4G/LTE) has been off the vast majority of time (airplane mode; I've been working at home) but wifi has been on 100%. GPS/Location has been mostly off - I already know I'm at home :-)

                    But I have watched hours of YT and (website) reading daily using the Vanadium browser. And my screen has always been on the full resolution / highest refresh rate since day 1.

                    If there is a problem it could be wifi modem related as it is not affecting me. I've actually been really impressed with the battery life for my use anyway.

                    Similarly, my old iphone will lose very, very little power in airplane mode and the screen off. everything is sleeping them of course.

                    You might want to check [https://reddit.com/r/googlepixel]. I have seen many favourable battery reports about the P7s there compared to earlier models.

                      nrt I'm on a 3G/LTE-only carrier and haven't noticed any difference when changing connection prefs.

                        ve3jlg same here, P7, first pixel of my life, battery is slightly over 24h, coming from Oneplus and LOS and that was a bit under 24h

                          Alright, so I did some more testing and research. The culprit is indeed the connection to the mobile network. Both, G5 and LTE only (seemingly slightly less so) drain about 2%/h in standby (meaning display off, phone laying there idle). On airplane mode on wifi the number drops to <1%/h - way more reasonable!

                          This all is unfortunate; maybe something can be done on OS level to reduce mobile energy expenditure?! The phone even appears to be ever so slightly luke warm having G5 turned on.

                          Besides all that I looked into battery life and charge-cycle behaviour on li-ion batteries. The best regimen I came up with is to maintain a relatively low depth of discharge and avoiding high charge voltages. Unfortunately GrapheneOS devs discarded the idea of implementing battery saving charging behaviours (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1089). Their reasoning is that the battery controller and firmware take care of it. Well, I am sure they do, but in the best interest of Google and not the user, who may not want to burn through their battery in 1.5 years on a 5yrs LTS phone.

                          cheers.

                            I feel the same here. My P7P has the worst battery I've had in a long time.

                            Connection and heat is better than on my old P6P, but damn. I never had to charge a phone that much

                              spl4tt

                              It’s things like this that make it challenging to recommend the pixels over iPhones. I know there is a large price difference, but this just seems like they can’t get the basics right.

                              No knock on graphene as this appears to all be hardware related, but between the battery life, warm phone and absolutely atrocious unusable fingerprint reader, the pixel 7 is one of the worst phones I’ve had in the last decade.

                                  applesbana

                                  TBH, I hated my P6P much more. It used to slow down after 5mins of just browsing because it got so damn hot. The reason wasn't even the CPU, but the stupid modem.

                                  The P7P fixed almost all my issues from the P6P, even the fingerprint is totally fine now, but the battery life got worse. Honestly though, if battery life is the only problem now, that's fine for me.

                                      spl4tt

                                      Yeah, it’s the inconsistency that I’m referring to that is so frustrating. You only got hit with one issue while I seem to have won the pixel lottery and got a triple whammy lemon..

                                          I'm having simply fantastic battery usage on P7P - simply outstanding. Could go 2 days without charging and still have some left.

                                          For those experiencing high battery drain related to mobile network - could it be your location or distance to the nearest cell tower? Recent changes on that tower or around it? Construction? Maybe try switching to LTE only if 5G in your area is weak or inconsistent.