Android Auto Has Been Hammering My Phone’s Battery

1 September 2026  |  4 min read

I've noticed recently that my phone needs to be charged way more often than I used to have to do it. I used to be able to go for nearly 2 days on an 80% charge, but I started having to charge daily. Sometimes even multiple times per day!

My first thought was that my 2.5 year old Pixel 9A might be starting to show signs of age, and the battery was on its way out. But I have always had charging optimised, so it only charges to 80%. Looking at the health of my battery in settings, it shows the health as normal and reports a 100% capacity. So it's not the battery.

The final straw came when I went to bed one evening with a charge of around 65%, only to wake up the next morning with just 30% of my battery remaining. How the fuck had my phone used so much battery while I was sleeping??

I checked which apps had used all that battery and to my surprise it was Google Maps and Android Auto.

6.5 hours of "screen time" while I was asleep!

Ok, something is clearly fucked with Android Auto here, but I've been using it for years and it's been fine, so what's changed?

New car

The only thing that has really changed from an Android Auto perspective was that I'd got a new car which now used wireless Android Auto instead of having to plug a cable in.

After some research, it turns out that wireless Android Auto is an absolute resource hog.

Unlike standard Bluetooth audio, the wireless projection that Android Auto uses forces your phone to continuously compress and stream a high frame rate video feed over a Wi-Fi link, all while aggressively hammering the GPS and cellular radios too.

To make matters worse, if the car is parked anywhere near the house, the phone can get stuck in a persistent background polling loop that blocks deep sleep, basically turning the handset into an expensive pocket radiator.

Nice in winter, but not so bueno when you need your phone and it has a dead battery!

The fix

The fix, dear reader, was rather simple. Disable wireless Android Auto. However, in practice it was more difficult than I had expected.

I had to enable developer options within Android Auto's settings so the "disable wireless Auto" option became available. Why is that even a "developer option"? It should be a standard option IMO.

Then I had to fiddle with the car's settings to not force wireless Android Auto, but instead prefer plain old Bluetooth. By doing this it allows me to still use Android Auto when I plug a USB C cable in, but by default it only uses Bluetooth.

The infotainment display in my car is pretty nice, so I'm not really missing anything by not using Android Auto. Plus, it annoys me that Navigation always shows up - I don't need it most of the time, so why waste the computing power and screen real estate?

Anyway, it's been a few days now and my battery is back to lasting me a couple of days. Worst case I need to quickly pull out my phone to open Spotify or my podcast app, AntennaPod, before I drive away, so the car picks up the media stream.

If I really need it, full Android Auto is only a USB C cable away, and I know it won't hammer my battery after I get out of the car.

Final thoughts

I've ranted about how complicated modern cars are before, but this is just another example of how annoying it is. I'm a technical person, so can work this out for myself, but many of my friends and family would have had no chance in figuring this shit out, let alone fixing the problem.

It's too much - they're too intrusive. I don't need to be connected everywhere. I don't need phone notifications in my car, and I usually don't need a sat nav - plus my car has it's own sat nav! I just want a way to stream media from my phone, without it getting as hot as the surface of the sun and wasting a tonne of battery power. Is that too much to ask?

Anyway, it's fixed now (I think). If you're having battery issues on your phone, it might be worth checking your wireless phone connection to your car too.

smartphone

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