With how all-encompassing smartphones are to our modern digital way of life, maintaining adequate battery life is of the utmost importance. On my personal Pixel 10 handset, I’ve recently been experiencing a noticeable dip in stamina — one that has been causing me to run to the nearest power outlet far more often than preferable.

There are a number of ways to improve battery life on any Android phone or tablet, but in the case of my Pixel 10, these measures failed to improve my situation by any substantial margin. That’s when I decided to do a bit of digging around within Settings to see what was actually causing most of my power drainage.

Sure enough, within a few minutes, I’d identified the culprit, and it was none other than the pre-installed Google application itself. With this in mind, I optimized a few Google-app related settings, and in turn my Pixel began to last much longer across each charge cycle. Most Android devices come with the Google app preinstalled, meaning that devices outside the Pixel ecosystem stand to benefit from these same optimizations.

Brand

Google

SoC

Tensor G5

Display

6.3-inch Actua Display 1080 x 2424 pixel resolution OLED (60-120Hz)

RAM

12GB

Storage

128GB/256GB

Battery

4,970mAh

Google’s Pixel 10 features the tech giant’s new Tensor G5 chip and a three-camera setup for the first time that includes a 10.8-megapixel telephoto camera.

How to disable the Google app’s Discover feed

The first order of business

Google’s Discover feed is an excellent tool for staying up-to-date on the news, with it aggregating content from a variety of publications and other sources. By default, however, Discover is pre-loaded in the background in order to make accessing it a smoother overall experience. Naturally, this comes at the expense of battery life, which is far from ideal.

If you’d rather eke out some extra battery stamina on your Pixel or other Android device, you can disable the Discover feed by following these steps:

1. Launch the Google application.
2. Tap or click on your profile image in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
3. From here, navigate to Settings > Other settings > App.
4. Toggle off Discover.

Note that when Discover is disabled, it becomes inaccessible from not only within the Google app itself, but also the leftmost screen within the Pixel launcher home screen interface. Discover remains active whenever opening up a new tab in Chrome, but this too can be disabled by going to Chrome > ellipsis (three-dot) menu > Customize new tab page > Discover feed and toggling the feature off.

Not all Android devices feature the Discover feed within their home screen launchers, but for Pixel phones in particular, it can be a great way to reduce background overhead and, in turn, to increase battery life by just a bit.

How to restrict the Google app’s background activity

The middle-ground option

Speaking of background overhead, the Google application is granted background usage on most Android devices (Pixel included) right out of the box. This allows for real-time updates to be sent to you (news, weather alerts, sports scores, and more), but it comes at the expense of battery life.

To restrict the Google app’s ability to run in the background and to therefore consume power, follow these steps:

1. Launch the Settings application.
2. Navigate to Apps > See all apps > Google.
3. Next, tap or click on App battery usage > Manage battery usage.
4. Lastly, toggle off Allow background usage.

How to disable the Google app outright

The nuclear option

For the most return on investment when it comes to battery life, you’ll need to settle on disabling the Google application outright. While the app can’t be deleted entirely on most Android devices (it’s a core component of the system that lives part-and-parcel alongside Google Play Services et al.), it can be effectively turned off, thus netting you some power savings.

To disable the Google app entirely, follow these steps:

1. Launch the Settings application.
2. Navigate to Apps > See all apps > Google.
3. Tap or click on the Disable button near the middle of the screen.
4. From here, a warning prompt will appear on-screen. Tap or click on the Disable app button located within this dedicated user interface prompt.

It’s worth mentioning that disabling the Google app doesn’t delete its data from your device. Rather, it simply turns off all background activity stemming from the app, while also hiding it from your app drawer and from other parts of the Android interface. Disabling the Google app may have unforeseen consequences when it comes to compatibility and functionality within certain other apps that rely on Google services, so be sure to keep this in mind before disabling the app altogether.