Conclusion
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For my use cases, the Pixel 8 has phenomenal battery life, comfortably lasting me over 2 days and sometimes even 3 days, with an average SOT of 05:51 from the 18 charging cycles I’ve tracked from 100% to 20%.
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I’m extremely happy with the Pixel 8’s battery life, and I look forward to getting even better battery life once I switch to GrapheneOS, as there should be even less battery consumption due to system apps such as Play Services not being part of the OS.
Context
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I got my Pixel 8 from the Google Japan store (Obsidian, 256GB) on 2024-02-21, upgrading from a Samsung Galaxy S22 (Exynos), which I had pre-ordered. I was overall happy with the S22 except for one major complaint: the battery life. The Exynos chipset was so inefficient and had such terrible idle drain that after my battery woes didn’t get solved even after getting my first unit replaced by Samsung, I became unhealthily obsessed with my phone’s battery life.
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My obsession led me to write multiple posts such as this one in a desperate attempt to have a usable phone, but I eventually concluded that the only way for me to have a phone that comfortably lasts me the full day was to get a new phone altogether. I decided to get the Pixel 8 mainly because I want to use GrapheneOS for maximum privacy and security, and the OS is only available for Pixel devices.
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When I got my Pixel 8, I decided to test the Pixel 8’s battery life on stock for a month, from 100% to 20%, with the below phone settings:
- LTE only (I don’t have a 5G plan)
- 120hz refresh rate
- Dark mode
- Bluetooth on, always connected to my Galaxy Watch 6 Classic and very often connected to other BT audio devices
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With the above configurations, I used the phone normally, then took screenshots once I got the low battery warning notification at 20%. I always took screenshots of the main battery usage screen, but I didn’t always take full screenshots of the entire usage detail screen, since I couldn’t figure out how to take full-screen screenshots while including the status bar with the battery percentage (Later learned that it’s not possible with Pixel devices).
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The graph and the data table below are the results of my tracking.
Personal usage patterns & use-case
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I’m on my phone pretty often, but I rarely run intensive tasks on it such as video rendering, gaming, and so on. I also don’t use any socials except reddit, and as a digital privacy advocate, I mostly use FOSS apps directly downloaded from Github or from F-droid, while I keep most of my proprietary apps from the Play Store frozen and sandboxed via Shelter that I unfreeze and use only when I need to use them.
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This means very few processes are running on my phone at any given time, and the processes that are running on my phone are usually lightweight and locally-run processes and processes from proprietary apps simply stop running when I freeze the apps.
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I am fully aware that this is not how most people use their phones, but I am making this post NOT to make a sweeping statement that the Pixel 8 has universally amazing battery life, but to share the Pixel 8’s battery life performance when used with my usage patterns & use-case.
Notable observations
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On 2024-03-14, I got the worst SOT of 02:33 over 2 days, but this was when I was having issues updating the software of my Galaxy Watch 6 Classic. The phone was having trouble updating my watch’s firmware for some reason, and the Galaxy Watch6 Manager used up 35% of battery during the 02:33 I was using the phone. This hasn’t happened since, but for context, SOT of around 2.5 hours was the average SOT I would get over a single day from 100% to 15% on my S22, so I wasn’t very alarmed at this figure.
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On 2024-03-12, I got a whopping SOT of 10:24 over 2 full days, which absolutely blew me away. You can verify from the album I made showing each day’s detailed usage screen which shows that I didn’t charge my phone at all since I took it off from the charger.
Data & screenshots
| date | SOT (h) | main_screenshot | full_usage_screenshot |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-02-21 | 07:26 | link | link |
| 2024-02-24 | 06:59 | link | - |
| 2024-02-26 | 05:07 | link | - |
| 2024-02-28 | 05:22 | link | link |
| 2024-03-02 | 03:56 | link | - |
| 2024-03-04 | 05:10 | link | - |
| 2024-03-05 | 07:16 | link | link |
| 2024-03-06 | 04:56 | link | link |
| 2024-03-02 | 04:31 | link | link |
| 2024-03-09 | 05:26 | link | link |
| 2024-03-11 | 08:06 | link | link |
| 2024-03-12 | 10:24 | link | album |
| 2024-03-14 | 02:33 | link | link |
| 2024-03-16 | 04:28 | link | link |
| 2024-03-18 | 03:55 | link | link |
| 2024-03-20 | 06:34 | link | link |
| 2024-03-22 | 05:41 | link | link |
| 2024-03-23 | 07:35 | link | link |
| average | 05:51 | - | - |
The Shelter app is great. I just moved all my work stuff into a separate account and disabled it for a weekend. Thank you.
Shelter is indeed fantastic, but you technically don’t need it if your main purpose is to isolate your work-related apps and snooze them for the weekend. You should be able to just use your phone’s existing Work profile without using Shelter.
The main value add of Shelter is that on top of isolating your apps to a separate sandbox, it allows you to freeze apps you don’t want running in the background and harvesting your data.