Some Pixel owners are blaming the March update for turning their phones into battery vampires, and a deleted Reddit post may have pointed to the reason: the CPU may not be entering Deep Doze the way it should. That would explain the classic complaint here – a phone that used to coast through the day suddenly needs a charger before dinner. Google has not acknowledged the bug yet, but reports are piling up across support forums and Issue Tracker.
The weird part is that this does not seem to be universal. Reports stretch from Pixel 7 to Pixel 10 Pro, yet plenty of people who installed the March Pixel update say their battery life is unchanged. That points to a bug that is ugly but uneven, which is usually the hardest kind to squash quickly. Google’s March Pixel update already bundled AI features, improved Now Playing, and security changes, so the battery drama is a familiar reminder that software feature lists and software quality are not the same thing.
What Deep Doze is supposed to do
Deep Doze is the background power-saving mode that should keep a phone from burning energy when it is sitting idle. If the CPU is being kept awake by something in the update, battery drain would spike even when the device is not doing anything interesting – which is, frankly, a very modern way to waste a day. The reported symptom fits that theory better than a random bad battery ever would.
That theory is still just a theory, though. The public evidence so far is a mix of user reports, one formal defect request in Google Issue Tracker, and a comment count that has climbed past 99. That is enough to get attention, not enough to prove root cause.
Pixel phones affected by the March update
The complaint has shown up on a broad spread of devices, including Pixel 7 models through the Pixel 10 Pro. That matters because it makes this look less like a single hardware fault and more like a software regression with a wide blast radius. It also means Google cannot neatly wave this away as an old-phone problem.
- Reported range: Pixel 7 to Pixel 10 Pro
- Symptom: battery drops much faster than normal
- Current status: no official Google acknowledgment yet
What Pixel owners can do now
For now, there does not appear to be a clean fix. A few users have also reported bootloop issues after the same March update, which is the kind of bonus nobody asks for. If your Pixel suddenly starts dying early, the practical move is to watch Issue Tracker, keep an eye on Google’s next update, and resist the temptation to call every battery slump a hardware failure.
Google has been asked for comment, and this story is likely to move fast once the company decides whether the culprit really is Deep Doze or something else buried in the March build. If the pattern holds, the next patch may be less about adding features and more about quietly fixing the ones that should never have broken in the first place.