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There's a New Play Store Bug Wrecking OnePlus, OPPO Batteries

Pictured: Dominik Bosnjak
By Dominik Bosnjak
September 28, 2020
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The latest Play Store update introduced a pretty devastating battery drain bug affecting devices from numerous popular brands. OnePlus, OPPO, and ASUS models appear to be among the hardest-hit devices. With that said, a smaller number of reports also mentions select smartphones from Samsung, Vivo, and several other manufacturers.

While the root of the issue is still unclear, the list of symptomps is anything but. As it pretty much comes down to abnormal CPU usage. Which, as you might imagine, is really bad news for your battery.

To be more specific, it’s the Play Store download service that’s now pushing various mobile chips into overdrive. Some screenshots that documenting the issue that can be found online are pretty ludicrous, to say the least. As the most unfortunate among the affected users are reporting Play Store draining over 70% of their last battery charges.

 

This Play Store battery drain bug is potentially affecting millions of users

It goes without saying that no software is perfect and the Play Store itself had its fair share of issues over the years. Enough for it to get its very own bug bounty program. But it’s still not every day that Google pushes out an update with such a performance-shattering bug.

Ultimately, it remains unclear exactly how prevalent these newly introduced issues are. But their OnePlus incidence, alone, indicates a pretty sizable group of affected users. More specifically, it appears devices as old as the 2018 OnePlus 6 are among the frequently impaired crowd. So, we’re already looking at millions upon millions of severe battery drain cases.

Google has yet to officially acknowledge the issue. Regardless, it would appear the bug is only present in the very latest Play Store release, build number 22.0.18. That would be the version that started rolling out last Thursday, September 24th. But before you restore an earlier version of the app, you may simply want to try clearing its cache from the Settings app and reinstalling it. As a limited number of reports suggests that as a working hotfix.

A small number of affected users also claim the latest Google News Android app is causing similar CPU usage spikes. While the number of such reports is small, Google News did receive a new update on Friday.

In any case, figuring out whether you’re affected shouldn’t be too difficult. If you have experienced poorer battery life than usual over the last week, you may want to check in on your OS power usage stats. Assuming you’ve been running the newest Play Store build for a few days, the OS should already have plenty of evidence against the faulty Play Store release.