GoKawiilAll good, right? Except that I’m honestly tired of hearing about Pixels and battery issues. It’s been 10 years, we’ve gone through everything from Qualcomm Snapdragon to Google Tensor processors, from smaller batteries to larger ones, from Android 7.1 Nougat to Android 16, and there’s always an issue with the Pixel battery. It’s high time Google actually took this seriously.
Did the Google's battery problems drive you away from buying another Pixel? 83 votes Yes, I switched to another brand. 28 % My current phone is a Pixel, but the next one won't be. 23 % No, I still choose the Pixel despite its battery problems. 27 % What battery problems? 23 %
Pixel battery woes are as inevitable as the air we breathe
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Before I talk about any historic battery issues, I’d like to focus on the present. At Android Authority, many of us own a Google Pixel 10 series phone and use it as our daily driver. Being on top of what Google is cooking up for Pixels and Android is pretty much a requirement of the job. And yet all of us have had questionable experiences with the phones’ battery life.
Robert has done several tests to prove that the Pixel 10 Pro XL tends to use way more power over 4G than Wi-Fi, compared to other phones (and even the Pixel 9 Pro XL). This came after his earlier battery life assessment, where he’d noticed that there wasn’t as much of an improvement as Google had promised with Tensor G5 compared to the G4.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that even while putting aside the data and Wi-Fi variables, my Pixel 10 Pro XL’s battery life has been very confusing and unreliable. There are days when I can get over seven hours of screen-on time, easily, and days when it’s down to 20% after just four hours of use, all while mostly using the same apps. When it’s great, I feel like I can do almost anything on my phone and it’ll simply sip battery, but when it isn’t, I can almost see the percentages drop with every few minutes of screen time.
We went from Snapdragon to Tensor, small batteries to large, Android Nougat to 16, and there's still an issue with the Pixel's battery life.
Check the two sets of screenshots below. In one of them, I managed to eke out seven hours of screen time before the battery saver mode got triggered at 19%, whereas in the other, I was down to 26% with less than five hours, all while being at home. For some reason, in the second case, Wi-Fi and data usage were through the roof, though.
It’s this kind of inconsistency that makes the Pixel battery experience so frustrating. When we asked you, our readers, what you thought about the Pixel 10 series’ battery life, the results were pretty telling. 32% of over 5,100 voters said it was great, 30% qualified it as consistently average, 22% as very inconsistent, and 16% as bad all the time.
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