I had been facing this problem as well and discovered a fix that worked on my Galaxy S3.
The issue had been causing my phone to drain to 0% battery within 8 hours. I am a very light user. Looking at the battery profile within Settings, Google+ was taking about 35% of the battery life, which is very high for an app that remains idle most of the time.
I noticed that Google+ was integrated into the Android OS, rather than being a stand alone app. This wasn't the set up in the out of the box OS, so I assumed something had gone wrong when Android changed the status of the app. So, there was probably some old data hanging around on the phone that the new App was struggling to cycle through and was thus caught in an endless loop. For me, this theory proved true (or seemingly so anyway!). My battery is down to 80% after about five hours of medium use today, so a vast improvement has been seen as a result.
The solution is simple and involves uninstalling and reinstalling the latest version of the app (but not uninstalling the app completely, which is an unavailable option):
- Go the Settings->Applications Manager
- Make sure you are in the 'Downloaded' list of applications (swipe left/right until 'Downloaded' is the title of the current list.
- Select the Google+ app
- Wait a few moments for the phone to calculate the size of the Data and Cache
- Once the option buttons become available (not greyed out), Select 'Clear Data'
- Select 'Clear Cache'
- Select 'Clear Defaults' (this last bit is probably not necessary, but let's do it just in case)
- All of the data values being shown under Data and Cache should now be '0'
- Now, click 'Uninstall Updates'
This will give you the old version of Google+, but with no data or cache associated with it.
DO NOT OPEN GOOGLE+ at this point.
- Restart your phone.
- Go to the Play store and download the latest version of Google+
- Open it and log in.
- Amend your settings (because you may have turned off auto-backup thinking it was the issue - it wasn't so turn it back on if you want)
Monitor the battery usage for Google+ - it should now be back to a reasonable percentage of the battery use.
I hope this helps others. I was going out of my mind trying to find a resolution to this one and couldn?t find one that wasn?t a hard factory reset.