So I am halfway through my day and not too happy with the results of having turned on google now cards. After 8 hrs and 16 minutes, I'm at 57% battery life. That includes a 29 minute call. Screen time isn't even enough to register. Now I have google play services appearing in the list. It never appeared before. It has kept the phone awake for 23 minutes and has used the GPS for 11 minutes. WTF?!?! It has been sitting on my desk right next to me all day. Why can't it do a little smarter checking?!?! Like notice that once you are on a given wifi, that you likely haven't moved until that wifi disconnects!
I'm going to have to see if I can now just go in and turn off the cards, or if it has effectively woken the beast. I'm just afraid that other apps will also waken google play and make it run down the battery. How is it that one service can be so detrimental to the phone?
When I buy a new phone I always set it as I know I'll use it the most, just set to be more battery efficient while it allows me to use everything I'll need. So in this past 2 weeks, I was testing and testing and it always gave me between 5.25-6 hours of SoT with everything I want on and working.
Then I always move to step 2, where I begin experimenting little by little with things that even when I don't use them, I see people using them and I'd try it just to see how helpful it can be to me, so yesterday I factory reset the phone and set everything again the same but just added the Location feature (turn it on all the time), I turned it on since last night and I began seeing the different Google cards related to them, I set it in Wifi and Cellular data only (Power saving mode) and even with that my battery life has been the worst since I got the phone, I got a little over 4 hours of SoT.
One thing I immediately noticed is that Google got rid of Location Reporting settings, so now, turning Location on will automatically trigger Location History and Reporting. Just before latest Google Updates (I know because I saw it there a couple of days ago) you could turn one on and not the other. Everybody know that the battery drain has always been related to Location Reporting, so in a summary, if you turn on Location now it will definitely drain your battery a lot more than before.
FYI, Location Reporting has never been needed, that's Google trick to know everywhere you go so it can use that data for their ads, so now they seem to just decided to force everybody to do the Reporting.
To finish, I turned Location off again (will turn it on when I need it) and my battery life got back to normal, averaging 5.5 hours of SoT right now. So, food for thoughts.