Abysmal WiFi related standby drain on Pixel 9

HerrderPrimzahlen

Hey folks, I bought a P9 in March 2026 and ever since I've been encountering huge problems withe the standby battery life on WiFi.

I had tested the phone on stock android after purchase and realized the issue from day one. Stock did never explicitly tell me the cause so, I had to figure it out by testing and testing all possible combinations. The result was clear. Despite all the cliches about Pixel's and their cellular modems (afaik the Exynos 5400 has gotten tremendously better) that's not what the issue is about. It consumes roughly 90-110 ma in standby if it's logged to certain WiFi networks but not all networks. It does not matter if WiFi is just enabled while not being logged in. Hence, I don't think it has anything to do the WiFi scanning.

After 2 weeks I switched to GrapheneOS anyway and I encountered exactly the same issue. The only "advantage" that the battery statistics where a bit more "honest" and it clearly admitted that the WiFi was the cause while stock had simply associated the consumption with "CPU".

As of approximately early May the situation got notably better by reducing the drain to 40-55 ma which is still a little too much in my opinion but, it was an improvement. Yesterday I got a new update and, since then it has gotten way way worse. The drain reached 100 ma again but this time the statistics don't clearly blame the WiFiifi the blame whatever they want. I've tested it three times in a sequence over 2-3 hours each time and got different causes for the drain each try. First try it claimed that it was 89% SYSTEM (Audio) while the phone was completely unused. second try it claimed it was 94% cellular mobile network and the third time, it claimed that the screen (which was off all the time) was the responsible for 55% percent of the drain.

Sadly, I've no idea how these battery usage statistics are being calculated but, the formula doesn't look very accurate.

Each try I created a bug report but currently, I feel overwhelmed by the millions of lines of logs.

What do other Pixel 9 owners experience?

de0u

HerrderPrimzahlen It consumes roughly 90-110 ma in standby if it's logged to certain WiFi networks but not all networks.

How many networks is the issue observed on? Is there any pattern? Is the issue observed on large Wi-Fi networks such as a university or workplace?

HerrderPrimzahlen

de0u

I tried out a bunch of networks inlcuding some hotels, trains, 2 universities both directly as well as via eduroam and via eduroam the problem never occured while it did when logged in directly. Hotel 1 was a a problem while Hotel 2 wasn't.

I've also tried out a bunch if micro hotpots where the problem never never occured even with kdeconnect available and running (Linux PC used as AP via WWAN).

In my bug reports I always get a long time of "Total WiFi Multicast wakelock time: 8h 11m 27s 824ms" which is about 99% of the time BUT this is a commonality of ALL wifi networks including the "good" ones as well as the "bad" ones.

Currently I don't have the opportunity to spend hours of waiting in strange WiFi networks just to get reasonable samples. It will take weeks of "living" to get the testing expanded.

de0u

HerrderPrimzahlen I tried out a bunch of networks inlcuding some hotels, trains, 2 universities both directly as well as via eduroam and via eduroam the problem never occured while it did when logged in directly. Hotel 1 was a a problem while Hotel 2 wasn't.

I suspect this will be very difficult to solve. Power drain on Wi-Fi depends on complicated interactions between the access point and the Wi-Fi firmware, to a lesser extent the Wi-Fi device driver, and also potentially the amount of broadcast traffic. The university and hotel data, especially the university data, suggest the next step would be asking a network engineer to look at internal data from access points.