How to Fix Battery Drain Issues on Nougat

Experiencing battery drain on your Android 7.0 Nougat running device? Well, you’re not alone. A number of Nexus users are reporting battery drain issue on Nougat since day one of installing the update.

Apparently, the battery drain has been around from Android N developer preview 3 release, but Google has been ignoring it. The bug doesn’t let the device go into doze mode (to save battery) and manifests itself as Android OS or Android System in battery usage reports on the device.

Google has acknowledged the battery drain issue on Nougat over at Android issue tracker here and here.

Some users have also reported the device awake time to be unnecessarily larger, meaning the device has trouble going to doze mode and hence the reduced battery life on Android Nougat.

Users also created a poll to know how many users are affected by this battery drain issue on Nougat. Check it out below:

Common Battery Drain Issues on Nougat

• Unnecessary battery usage by Android OS or Android System.
• Larger Awake time (green bar) in battery usage graph.
  └ Tap on battery usage graph on your device to see Awake time details.
• 5 times more battery drain with Bluetooth on Nougat compared to Marshmallow.
• Too much battery usage by Wi-Fi on Nougat.

While we don’t have fix for all these battery issues on Nougat, but folks over at reddit have found a workaround to fix the majority of these issues.

How to Fix Android Nougat Battery Drain Issues

1. Disable Ambient display: Go to Settings » Display » turn Off Ambient display toggle.
2. Disable Adaptive Brightness: Go to Settings » Display » turn Off Adaptive brightness toggle.
3. Remove Body Sensors permission for Google Play services:
   1. Go to Settings » Apps » select All apps from the dropdown.
   2. Select Google Play services from the list of apps installed on your device.
   3. On the App info page for Google Play services, select Permissions.
   4. Turn Off Body Sensors permission for Google Play services.
      └ If it gives you a warning, select “Deny anyway”.
4. Reboot phone.

That’ all. This should hopefully resolve battery drain issue on your Nougat running device.

Note: The proposed solution on this page to fix battery drain on Android 7.0 Nougat are only a workaround. We still don’t what exactly is the issue of battery drain on Nougat, guess we’ll just have to wait for Google to officially release a patch.

Stay tuned.. Happy Androiding!