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Google Acknowledges Play Store Causing Battery Life Issues for Some Users; Fix Coming

Google Acknowledges Play Store Causing Battery Life Issues for Some Users; Fix Coming

By Abhinav Lal | Updated: 15 September 2016 19:36 IST

Highlights

Google Play v6.9.15 was said to be causing the problem
Google said only a small number of users were affected
Bug caused by frequent unsuccessful location requests

Google was in the headlines for the wrong reasons this week, with reports of 24x7 location tracking on Android devices. The search giant was also in the news for the most recent version of Google Play (v6.9.15) causing battery life issues for some users. Google has responded to the latter reports on its product forums.

Addressing the issue, Google Play Community Manager Amanda said, "We identified a bug affecting a small number of users in a recent release of the Google Play. For users in the error state, the Google Play app was unable to obtain GPS, causing it to make frequent unsuccessful requests and use battery. We will be rolling out a fix in the next few days."

As Google says, users can expect a fix to come their way soon, solving their battery problem. Till then, they can revert to an older version of Google Play (v5.1.11 is reportedly not causing any problems), a method complaining users on the Google Product Forum resorted to.

To recall, users have since last week been reporting Google Play v6.9.15 is eating up a lot of their battery, with a Searching for GPS notification being triggered and persisting despite attempts to remove it.

As we mentioned, Google was in the news earlier this week when a security researcher accused it of tracking the location of Android users 24x7 via Google Play services. The researcher noted that if users attempt to disable location permission for Google Play services, they will be notified that the location services of the entire phone (and for all other apps that use Google's Play location API) will be disabled alongside. This causal relationship is surprising, given the move towards granular privacy controls.

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