Following the rollout of the April 2026 update on Google Pixel phones, a widespread battery drain issue has hit, but the company is looking into the matter.
For the past few days, an Issue Tracker thread has picked up hundreds of comments regarding the same issue, battery drain following the April 2026 Pixel update. The sheer amount of attention on this thread tells us this issue is pretty widespread, with nearly 600 comments in less than 10 days. There are reports on Reddit and elsewhere, too.
The problem seems to boil down, as one user found, to CPU wakeups, with the phone continuously working in the background, even when the screen is off, and you’re not using it. Others report that battery drain is noticeable even when the Pixel is in airplane mode, while battery life has been cut to just a few hours of screen time or even cut in half for some.
Google first acknowledged the issue on April 14 and has continued to request bug reports as it investigates the issue. No fix has been found just yet, though.
Hopefully, Google can identify the problem in time for the May update in the next couple of weeks.
If you’re seeing this problem on your Pixel, let us know in the comments below.
More on Google Pixel:
- What do you want Google’s ‘Pixel Glow’ lights to do?
- Google working on Pixel ‘laptop’ and ‘Pixel Glow’ lights that are also coming to phones
- Google Pixel is growing in 2026 as almost everyone else struggles in the chaos
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