How do you turn off Battery saver for GPS to work

[Android Central Question]

After the March 2019 update I can't see how I turn off battery saver so that my GPS works. I go to Device Care -> Battery ->Power Mode and there are 4 options none to turn it off. High performance, Optimised, Medium power saving and Maximum power saving. All the forums previously said to get GPS/Strava to work, get Location as High Accuracy and turn off battery saver. Please help....

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Which phone? How do you know your GPS isn't working? Are you getting an error message, or are mapping apps not locating you correctly?

 

[Rukbat]

High Performance is probably Battery Saver off, since the two are opposites.

But, as @B. Diddy said, how do you know that GPS isn't working? (You can install GPS Status & Toolbox to see what it's doing. On the Pixel 2, with battery saving on, GPS works just fine.)

 

[cbury]

I definitely feel your pain. I recently got a Pixel and the "flaky" GPS was driving me crazy, nearly causing me to get into fender-benders. But on a Reddit forum I think found the solution that also won't totally drain your battery all the time. Of course, Google had two simple ways to avoid this "feature" from becoming a bug - either return the control over location services to the phone owner AND/OR provide the option to turn off Battery Optimization when charging (as you can easily do while driving).

I don't think you have to turn off Battery Saver. Instead you need to turn off "Battery Optimization" for the specific Apps you want to be able to access GPS while Battery Saver is active.

In Pie:

go to Settings.

tap "Apps and Notifications"

tap an App that needs GPS even when on Battery Saver - say, Maps.

scroll to bottom and tap "Advanced"

tap "Battery"

tap "Battery Optimization"

In blue bar near the top, tap the "V" then select "All apps"

Again scroll to the App that needs to have Optimization turned off.

Click the app and select "Don't Optimize" then tap "Done"

Repeat those last two steps for any apps you want to have GPS access while Battery Saver is active.

When you have changed the optimization for all the apps you want (you may find some are set to "not optimized" that you actually did want optimized, for example, some social media apps), you can close out of Settings.

NOTE: I have done the above, but haven't field-tested the results. I will try to update with how it worked.

 

[Rukbat]

And in 10, you can now have location services on only when an app is running, all the time or never. They added that first choice.