Google has apologised for remotely enabling the Battery Saver mode on some Android Pie phones without users’ consent.
Owners of Android Pie phones took to Reddit after noticing the feature, which affects the background activity of apps, had been activated. Google has responded to the posts, apologising and claiming the feature was enabled by mistake.
“This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended,” Google says on the PixelCommunity subreddit.
“We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion.”
Related: Android Pie Phones: When will your phone get the update?
The affected phones are the Pixel handsets and the Essential Phone, which are basically the only ones with access to the full Android 9 Pie operating system at this stage. The change could have resulted in users not receiving notifications from key apps, while automatic location-based features wouldn’t work as normal.
Some Android Pie users were annoyed by the behind-the-scenes fiddling, others were less concerned.
Amorpheus wrote: “Them having the power to do this on end user devices using official releases also seems like going a little far.”
FZ_Nation added: “Yeah the whole “we’ll fix it guys” is not gonna fly on this one. What other changes are being made behind the scenes that may or may not be interfering with users’ lives and or / feeding data to Google?”
Meanwhile, UnaccepableUse added: “I don’t know why you’re upset about it. It’s not like it’s your life story. Google, as far as I know, has the ability to do that for all its apps. It would be stupid of them not to have the ability to remotely change settings.”
Have you noticed any of your phone’s key settings changing? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
