When I got my Pixel 7 Pro I was shocked at how bad the battery life was, even without google play services. (came from a 5a) I love the phone, but the battery life makes me regret my purchase almost every day.

Then my coworker got the Pixel 8 Pro, and it has WAY worse battery life than my 7 Pro, he even went and got a new one at the store because it was so bad it had to be a fault, but no. It just is absolute garbage.

Opposite of my experience, I daily drove a Pixel 6 Pro from launch until 8 Pro launched and have been using 8 Pro since. I upgraded because I can, my Pixel 6 Pro is working just fine, I've added it to my growing device catalog for testing during mobile development. Over the course of the 6 Pro, I replaced it twice, once for a cracked screen and the second time for cracked back glass using preferred care (both close in time to each other from similarly stupid drops). I do not use a case for my phone. None of those three devices had any issues with battery. My partner is using a 7, two of my friends have 6 Pros, and I just upgraded my parents from 4a to 7a and battery hasn't really been a serious problem from any of them. It's not insanely good but it's also not a pain point for me.

As an engineering lead I do basically all of my non-programming work directly on Pixel, including tons of remote desktop, meetings, GitHub/productivity, k8s management, etc. I don't get to write code nearly as much any more, probably around 10-20% of my work week. At least for those workloads, things are fine. But the workload you run can dramatically change things, especially if you've got particularly power hungry apps involved. The OS gives you tools to identify what those apps might be when you dig into the battery area of settings.

> even without google play services. (came from a 5a)

Since you can't remove GMS from a Pixel without flashing a ROM to it as far as I know, can I assume you are not using stock software? A lot of Pixel's battery performance is made up using the adaptive battery features. When they are off, things are more dicey. Do those work on custom non-GMS ROMs to begin with?

To sum it up, battery can definitely be better, but I'm just not seeing the kinds of problems people complain about and that surprises me given my experiences.

Note though that I can attest the modem in the 6 Pro wasn't super great, and the design of the 6 Pro with it's curved glass definitely contributed to those drops taking out the screen/back.

Out of curiosity, do you have any Meta apps installed? I've tried to kinda debug the issue by reading the system logs. In the end my battery life was greatly improved just by full removal of facebook, instagram and, especially, messenger. It also helps to disable background data for all the apps you don't explicitly want to run in background and to set "restricted" battery mode for them. I'm using grapheneos with sandboxed playservices by the way.

That's fucked up. I wanted to buy a Pixel just for GrapheneOS but it looks like it's not gonna happen. Time to look for a new phone I suppose.

I wonder if there's a Termux equivalent for iPhone. It's the only thing keeping me on Android at this point.

Mobile vendors really need to fix this battery issue. Currently on S21 and the battery can barely make it to 5 hours.

If my financials got better, I'll definitely move to iPhone

As someone with an S21 too that doesnt sound normal, have you checked your background apps and battery health? The energy saver setting works pretty good too.

Google is worth what, a trillion dollars? Surely they can figure out how to make a good smartphone? This isn't even their first try.