Your phone uses battery even when the screen is off. Some apps continue to sync and check for updates in the background, but turning off all power-consuming services can interrupt notifications, updates, and other core functions. Once I figured out what the worst offender was on my phone, a few tweaks gave me about two extra hours on a single charge. The surprise was that the name at the top of my battery list was not the application I needed to change.
The scapegoat and the real culprit
One app is framing another
If you’ve ever opened your battery settings, you may have seen Google Play Services near the top of the list. It seems to be the obvious culprit, so restraining or forcibly stopping it may seem like the logical move. But that battery figure doesn’t tell the whole story. It shows which service is doing the work, not necessarily which application triggers it.
Think of Google Play services as Android’s behind-the-scenes support system. Handle tasks like location requests, account syncing, and push notifications for Google and other apps. Disabling it or restricting it too much is a bad solution: it can interfere with notifications, Play Store, Maps, and logins.
On my phone, the app driving most of that activity was the Google app. Its location access, voice features, and background syncing were still asking Play Services to stay active through wake locks that prevent the processor from going to sleep. Play Services took the hit visible on the battery screen, but the Google app was the one that pulled the strings.
How I fixed it without uninstalling anything
Background Features You Can Safely Disable
The first feature I disabled is the Discover feed. This is the news feed within the Google app. It loads articles and images in the background, so the feed appears instantly when you open it. That background search keeps your phone’s data connection active. To turn it off, open the Google app, tap your profile photo, go to Settings, then Other settings, and turn off Discover. Some phones also offer a separate home screen switch for the Discover page, but that varies by manufacturer.
With Discover disabled, I still had a background drain running. He Hello Google The feature keeps the microphone listening for the wake word 24 hours a day. To turn it off, I opened the Gemini app, tapped Menu, then my profile photo, and went to Settings. In Talk to Gemini hands-free, I turned off “Hey Google.” You lose hands-free activation, but you can still open Gemini manually when you need to.
Once those two changes are made, the Google app can still activate and run tasks in the background. I opened Settings > Apps > Google > Battery on my phone and then chose Restricted. This limits the app’s background jobs, scheduled tasks, and network activity. Try it for a day and switch back if you miss something important.
Google is raising Android battery standards
New standards for how applications use energy
Partial activation locks are a legitimate part of Android. They allow an app to keep the processor running after the screen turns off so it can finish important work in the background, such as completing a download or performing an urgent task. Android already manages battery usage in the background through tools like Doze Mode and App Standby, but those tools don’t flag or penalize apps for holding activation locks for too long.
That gap is what Google and Samsung set out to close. By refining the way Wake Lock usage is measured, Google raised the bar for battery performance by the end of 2025 and made Wake Lock overtracking a critical quality standard in the Play Store.
Under this policy, a session counts as excessive when an application maintains non-exempt partial activation locks for more than two cumulative hours in a day. This only applies when the screen is off and the app is running in the background. Activation locks tied to audio playback, location services, and user-initiated background tasks are exempt.
If more than 5% of an app’s sessions cross that line over 28 days, Google may exclude it from recommendation surfaces and may display a warning in its store listing telling users that the app “may cause your device’s battery to drain faster.” Enforcement of the law began to be implemented on March 1, 2026.
Check what else is running after this.
After making these changes, give your phone a full day of normal use. Then go to Settings > Battery and open Battery Usage. Look at the background time of the Google app. If it has gone down, the changes are working. While you’re there, check other apps in the list that show high background time for apps you didn’t actively use that day.
