Battery drain S9: Google Play = main suspect

[NinoGaRRis]

Hi all,

Since ~3 days the battery of my Samsung S9 is draining multiple times faster than it usually did (never had any battery issues). The last two nights my phone died during the night, even though I went to bed with 50 or 60+ %. The phone also seems to heat up more than usual at times.

Checked the battery usage directly after powering up this morning (pls see screenshot below) - and it shows going to bed at midnight with around 60% battery, then all normal until about 3am - and then within ~4 hrs the battery drained from ~60% to dead. Google Play Services is shown as the worst offender. (it feels like this is connected to the most recent Play Stores update - where it changed the look/style of the Play store app (e.g. accessing and updating your apps by clicking on your top right corner instead of top left as it was before)

Any helpful advice or tips to check?

UPDATE 18.04.2021: Still having the same issue and none of my manual checks/workarounds has worked so far. Every couple of days my phone dies within a few hours over night - every time it happens the battery usage looks exactly like on the pic below. Something is not right with Google Play Services as it always is the only app showing the heavy consumption. The phone also turns noticeably warmer during these few hours of high battery consumption. I have not found a way to completely disable Google Play Services or at least turn of their background activities. Any advice?

UPDATE 27.04.2021: Since about 10 days my girlfriend's Samsung S10+ is having the same issue. Nothing that we have tried seems to be properly working. Most times I go to bed, the battery drain is within a normal threshold, but Phone is dead in the morning - last night it only started draining hours after I went to bed.

UPDATE 03.05.2021: Unfortunately no change - issue still happens multiple times a week. Always showing Google  Play Services as the only offender of draining the battery way stronger than usual. I really hope that someone from Samsung would look into that and I also really hope that this would be addressed in the upcoming software update for May.

UPDATE 14.05.2021: Goods news from my side - in the last couple of days i didn't have the battery drain issue at all and on top of that since yesterday I had the May update available for my S9. What I have read so far here and in some other forums is that folks who did receive the May update already, stopped having issues 🙂 Please keep me all posted here.

Thanks in advance,

Nino

Phone: S9 (SM-G960F) One UI 2.5 / Android 10 / Kernel Version 4.9.118-21315611 (Tue Mar 23 2021)

Google Play Services Version 21.09.15

Google Play Store Version 24.7.28-21

[NotanIphone]

Same here.  After update: Fast battery drainage. Hot phone. No solution.

[Col79]

I have exactly the same issue on S9 since the last update (April security update 2021): extreme battery drain with sudden jumps from e.g. 40% to 3%, phone heating up quickly, battery usage attributed to Google Play Services, high data usage by Android OS.  Clearing phone OS cache did have no effect. 

[Ellende66]

I have the exact same problem immediately after the update of my S9 on April 19th. My phone is pretty much useless since. Phone gets very hot, even when not charging. Battery dies overnight within 2 to 3 hours after a full charge without using the phone. Performance of the phone is awfull ever since.

Removed a lot of apps to free up space, more that  15Gb of free storage available. According to my S9 the Health is at 100%.

Extreme battery drainage. Battery drain is mainly caused by Samsung Health and Google Play  Services, both constantly at 35% and 22% battery use. Rebooting my phone on a daily basis has no effect whatsoever. 

My S9 is just under 18 month old. After the April update the performance is getting worse on a day-by-day basis to the extent that my S9 is pretty much unusable. Unfortunately no way to roll back the April update. Hopefully this gets fixed VERY SOON.

Obviously extremly annoying... Considering a switch to another brand due to these problems without any feedback from Samsung.

[gummbah]

same problem here. Since the april update the battery has repeatedly drained within hours with the device getting hot. I noticed that this only occurred with wifi activated, so now as a temporary workaround I keep wifi switched off. As soon as it's switched on the battery drain/heating starts again.  

Samsung please fix this!

[Brunte]

It's the same for me after the update the battery
usually was at 70% in the evening now
is it empty or as yesterday 15% and the phone barely used So samsung fix this now!!

[NotanIphone]

About a week later the fast battery drainage problem disappeared. After a couple of days with extreme drainage having to charge to make it through the day, I had a couple of days with considerable drainage down to 40 or 50% at the end of the day. Now I seem to be back at 70% at the end of the day. Only thing that changed on my phone is that I removed samsung health but that was more because the app annoys me.

[NinoGaRRis]

Thanks for sharing your experience and glad that the issue went away for you, but Samsung Health is not the root cause for me. Same happens with disabled/uninstalled Samsung Health. My battery just drained again last night... Hoping for the May update from Samsung...

[SimonB]

Hi. I've got this problem too, since the April update. In my case I noticed that the drain stopped when I switched wifi off. So I installed a data monitor app. The culprit is listed as Software update, it goes crazy and just endlessly downloads data, gigabytes and gigabytes of it. If I reboot, it stops for a while - anything up to a few hours, then starts doing it again. There's no update to download, and it's not app updates - I have those switched to manual, and they appear under google play store anyway. Because it's constantly using wifi, that drains the battery and heats the phone.

I tried installing a firewall to stop it, but I couldn't, it seems to bypass it - the network access doesn't seem to appear, so I couldn't block it. It's incredibly annoying, I'm having to charge 2 or 3 times a day.

[gummbah]

thanks for sharing your experience and the hint about software update. I've disabled the update related apps com.sec.android.soagent, com.wssyncmldm and com.android.dynsystem but the issue remains, unfortunately. With wifi  switched on the battery starts draining heavily. For me "Android OS" is listed as the main wifi user, which is unfortunately not very helpful in identifying the culprit.

[kinetic9]

This seems to have been the culprit for me too. I've been trying everything to stop my phone battery draining since I updated. I've turned off "Auto download over Wi-Fi" under the Software update settings, and I've had two days now with no excessive battery drain. So far today Google Play Services is showing less than 2% usage under my battery stats. Fingers crossed it stays that way.