Last updated: December 28th, 2018 at 20:32 UTC+02:00

Final Galaxy S9 Pie update may have a serious battery drain issue

The final version of the Galaxy S9 Android Pie update is impressively stable, or so it seemed. Yours truly still stands by his opinion that the update is quite stable overall for such a quick release, but it looks like a battery drain issue may have slipped past Samsung’s bug checking team. Battery life has been better on Pie than Oreo in general, but I just saw my Galaxy S9+ go down from 10 percent battery to 5 percent in a matter of seconds, without the phone reporting any app going haywire in the background.

No random reboots, but Samsung may have a battery drain issue at hand

Even when an app does too much background activity, battery charge does not go down so quickly, so this is likely one of those pesky bugs that always show up in the first official release of an Android OS update. It’s unclear if I’m the only one affected; I saw one comment on our site that the Galaxy S9’s battery is draining quickly after the Pie update, but we’ll need more reports to be sure if this is a widespread issue. If it is, it may be why Samsung hasn’t yet released the update in more than a handful of countries. Well, that or the company has no idea this is an issue, in which case one can hope it will be fixed before the update becomes more widely available.

And it could be a while before that happens. The company did say both the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 would get Pie in January, and with no official announcement about the Galaxy S9 update, the Christmas rollout could have been a limited release to test the waters. The Galaxy Note 9 beta program is still ongoing, and it’s possible Samsung will simply wait until it has the Note 9 update ready before beginning the worldwide rollout for either flagship.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on my Galaxy S9+ to see if this issue pops up again. Do leave a comment if you have noticed something similar on the final version of Android Pie on your Galaxy S9 or S9+.