Last week some Google Pixel users noticed that their battery saver setting was turning on by itself. As it turns out, it was because of Google.
As the name suggests, battery saver mode helps to conserve a device’s battery power by doing things such as preventing apps from working in the background, delaying notifications and turning off location services.
Discussion around this started over on the r/GooglePixel subreddit on September 14 when a redditor asked “is anyone else’s power saving mode turning itself on even though you have it off?”
Affected users seemed to be running Android Pie OS on their devices. On the same day that the thrad was posted, a spokesperson took to Reddit to explain, citing an internal test that was accidentally rolled out as the reason for the setting going rogue.
“Hi all, some of you may have noticed that battery saver turned on automatically today. This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended. We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion.”
This mistake not only affected Pixel phones, but some other devices running Android Pie. Some users who also found their battery saver mode to be turned were using Essential Phone, OnePlus 6 and the Nokia 7+
While some Redditors were understanding of the issue, others brought up privacy concerns in relation to the incident.
[BBC]