I turned off one Google app and gained nearly two hours of battery life

Your phone uses the battery even when the screen is off. Some apps keep syncing and checking for updates in the background, but turning off every service that uses power can break notifications, updates, and other core features. Once I figured out which one was the worst offender on my phone, a few changes gave me close to two extra hours on a single charge. The surprise was that the name at the top of my battery list was not the app I needed to change.

The scapegoat and the real culprit

One app is framing another

Rob / MakeUseOf

If you have ever opened your battery settings, you may have seen Google Play Services near the top of the list. It looks like the obvious culprit, so restricting it or force-stopping it can feel 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 app is triggering it.

Think of Google Play Services as Android's behind-the-scenes support system. It handles tasks such as location requests, account syncing, and push notifications for Google and other apps. Disabling or heavily restricting it is a poor fix: it can interfere with notifications, the Play Store, Maps, and sign-ins.

On my phone, the app driving most of that activity was the Google app. Its location access, voice features, and background syncing kept calling on Play Services to stay active through wake locks that prevent the processor from sleeping. Play Services took the visible hit on the battery screen, but the Google app was the one pulling the strings.

How I fixed it without uninstalling anything

Background features you can safely turn off

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Close Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

Digvijay Kumar / MakeUseOf

The first feature I turned off is the Discover feed. This is the news stream inside the Google app. It loads articles and images in the background, so the feed appears instantly when you open it. That background fetching keeps your phone's data connection active. To disable it, open the Google app, tap your profile picture, go to Settings, then Other settings, and turn off Discover. Some phones also offer a separate home-screen toggle for the Discover page, but that varies by manufacturer.

With Discover off, I still had one background drain running. The Hey Google feature keeps your microphone listening around the clock for the wake word. To turn it off, I opened the Gemini app, tapped Menu, then my profile picture, and went to Settings. Under Talk to Gemini hands-free, I toggled off 'Hey Google.' You lose hands-free activation, but you can still open Gemini manually whenever you need it.

With those two changes done, the Google app can still wake up and run tasks in the background. I opened my phone's Settings > Apps > Google > Battery, then chose Restricted. This limits the app's background jobs, scheduled tasks, and network activity. Test it for a day and switch back if you miss anything important.

Google is raising Android's battery standards

New standards for how apps use power

Afam Onyimadu / MUO

Partial wake locks are a legitimate part of Android. They let an app keep the processor running after the screen turns off so it can finish important background work, such as completing a download or handling a time-sensitive task. Android already manages background battery use through tools like Doze mode and App Standby, but those tools do not flag or penalize apps for holding wake locks too long.

That gap is what Google and Samsung set out to close. By refining how wake lock usage is measured, Google raised the bar on battery performance in late 2025 and made excessive wake lock tracking a core quality standard on the Play Store.

Under this policy, a session counts as excessive when an app holds non-exempt partial wake 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. Wake 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 on its store listing telling users the app "may cause their device's battery to drain faster." Enforcement began rolling out on March 1, 2026.

Related I used my phone without Google services for a week and it was (almost) fine I never realised how dependent I was on Google services until I tried to live without them. I've found some good alternatives that respect my privacy.

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 for the Google app. If it has dropped, the changes are working. While you are there, check other apps on the list that show high background time for apps you didn't actively use that day.