Google Pixel’s hidden smart feature can save your battery life

Balancing regular use and draining a smartphone’s battery can be difficult, especially if you have a mountain of apps installed. That’s why manufacturers offer built-in settings and features that give you more control over your phone’s battery without being too cumbersome. Google has had an adaptive battery feature in every Google Pixel since Android 9. The best part is that you don’t need to enable it (unless you’ve turned it off in your settings) or manually make changes for it to work optimally; it’s already built into your Pixel phone.

This is a smart feature that analyzes the overall usage patterns of your apps with an on-device machine learning model and makes necessary adjustments to save power. While the feature focuses on your most used apps to apply the best settings, you can also set it manually through individual app settings, meaning you can technically make changes if you find that the adaptive battery feature isn’t working the way you want.

For example, if you prefer to have Spotify open during a ride and find that the app responds too slowly when you open it (because background activity and performance are limited), you can open the app settings for Spotify, select App battery usage, then tap Allow background usage and choose Unrestricted to remove the adaptive battery settings applied to your app. This way the app will always work normally, regardless of your usage habits. Be aware that this will drain your battery more, as most apps use the optimized option to match your usage, so they are not always active.

If you haven’t changed the default settings on your Google Pixel, the adaptive battery option should be enabled by default. Otherwise, it’s pretty simple to turn it back on. On your Google Pixel:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Battery saver.
3. Scroll down and tap Adaptive Battery.
4. Once you are in the Adaptive Battery settings section, check if Use Adaptive Battery is enabled (a checkmark icon should appear in the enabled area).

You can also check in your apps list how battery is being managed by browsing each app in your Settings, or you can tap the app’s battery usage in the App section of your Pixel settings to give you a shortcut to the app’s battery usage section by app without scrolling through its general settings. However, Google notes that not all options or steps work without Android 14 or later installed.

Since Adaptive Battery is a smart (AI-driven) feature that works based on your daily usage habits, it will restrict or prioritize the apps you use most regularly. This means that not all apps will get the resources they need to update in the background or access your network for free. Apps that aren’t actively used, like those that haven’t been opened in months, will likely be placed in the restricted stack. It is also based on historical behavior and will erase what it learns after a factory reset.

So you’ll get the most out of this feature if this smartphone is the primary driver and you open apps more consistently. But for those who use apps on their Google Pixel irregularly, perhaps because you split your time between a tablet and a computer, your actual usage habits don’t reflect how important these apps are to keeping you up to date, like Gmail. On-device machine learning divides your apps into five categories: active, active, frequent, rare, and never.

It can mislabel your app if you don’t spend enough time using it on your device – and remember that the initial learning phase can also drain your battery, as it takes time to properly optimize them (it goes through calibration, which can take weeks). But generally speaking, it’s there to save battery and becomes especially useful for those who hoard apps, forget to uninstall them, and haven’t touched an app in months, leaving them buried on their phone. Otherwise, if these applications are left unchecked, they can passively drain, simply by existing.