Android users have been complaining that a recent update to Google Play caused havoc with battery life.
The traditional explanations you’ll hear for an upsurge in power usage are “you must have a virus on your phone,” or “you probably turned on GPS without realising it.”
We’ll ignore the “you got a virus” issue for now; it’s not relevant here. (In any case, please don’t rely on power consumption as an indicator of infection, because malware can do plenty of harm while hardly touching your battery.)
GPS is a receive-only technology – your phone isn’t energetic enough to communicate back to the GPS satellites, which orbit at an altitude of about 20,000km – but it’s still notorious for eating through batteries in order to keep up an accurate stream of location data.
Additionally, mobile phones on which you’ve authorised the collection of location data keep up an outbound data stream anyway, communicating back to one or more vendors via Wi-Fi or the mobile network.
That’s how the apps on your mobile phone always seem to know where you are: they generally do know where you are.
The obvious solution is to turn off location services altogether, but with Google Play showing up as the main culprit, why not use the granular, per-app permissions system in Android 6 and 7 to get the power-sapping Google Play off your tail while letting your other apps know where you are?
After all, you may have installed an app like Sophos Mobile Security, which requests access to location data up front in case it needs it to trigger its “find your phone” feature, but doesn’t need to call home all the time and therefore doesn’t flatten your battery.
You might consider it reasonable to leave your chosen security product in touch with your location, just in case you need to know where your phone is, while cutting off the Google apps that go after your location data incessantly because they want to know where you are.
No per-app choice for Google Play
It turns out you can’t do that.
The Android permission control subsystem that lets some apps read your location while blocking others is, it seems, brokered through Google Play Services itself.
Google Play essentially acts as a geolocation proxy: it keeps track of where on behalf of the entire device (and, of course, on behalf of Google), and passes that data on to other apps only if they’re authorised to access it.
If you go to Settings | Apps | Google Play services | Permissions, you’ll see the app has the right to read your location, with a toggle that implies that you can turn off location access for the Play Services app alone:
But the Google Play services app, however, can only be denied access to your location data if you turn location collection off entirely, unlike other apps such as Google Chrome or Sophos Mobile Security, where the per-app toggle works as expected:
In other words, if you want to allow even a solitary third-party app to have access to your geolocation data, you have to let the Google Play at that data, too.
And Google really does want to know where you are, because the moment-by-moment detail of your movements is worth money to Google, who can sell that data to advertisers in real time, for example as you walk near, walk into and then walk around a store.
Just like Minority Report.
If you want to opt out, you’re back where you were before Google introduced per-app permissions, with Location on or off your plain, binary choice.
OK, so not quite like Minority Report, because there is still a choice.
For now…
Learn more about Google’s Nearby real-time tracking project ►
Learn more about controlling security and privacy on your phone ►
kurt
It doesn’t seem to matter how much evil google does, people continue to use google services. Currently the only product from google I use is Youtube on occasion.
Anonymous Coward
My assumption was, Google makes my phone, reads all my e-mail, and my calendar, and knows what apps I use, what I watch on YouTube and everything else about me. Why would I have ever assumed that I could deny Google my location data if it was on?
At least now the adverts I get will be slightly more useful.
Krzysztof
This article is incorrect. Google Play Services is not the Play Store. In fact, I have the location permission disabled for Play Store and everything still works correctly.
Paul Ducklin
I wrote “Play Store” once, but “Google Play” and “Google Play services” everywhere else. I have now changed the lone mention of “Play Store” so it says “Google Play.” Hope that clarifies.
(On my device, the app known as Google Play Store had no special permissions whatsoever. I am assuming it acts merely the front end for the Play services app, which does the networking and geolocation part. So the ability to turn location data off for the Play Store app is a bit of a red herring, I suspect.)
Mahhn
Yo Sophos, make a firewall for our phones that can block Google, with extreme prejudice :)
Paul Ducklin
You can buy a device that does something a bit like that at the Apple Store :-)
Evus
Apple isn’t tracking you?
Paul Ducklin
The OP asked about “blocking Google,” not about “avoiding tracking by Apple” :-)
nzgeek
Is this potentially related to Google’s location history feature? That keeps a track of locations you’ve been to, reporting them back to Google. It was fingered in battery drain issues a few year back.
It’s possible to turn location history off completely. If you go into the Google Settings app > Location > Google Location History, there should be a toggle switch to allow you to turn this off. There’s also a button that allows you to delete the data that Google already has stored.
This setting is well hidden, but certainly something to turn off if you want to reduce how much data Google collects on you.
Anonymous
@Paul Ducklin – right. As if Apple doesn’t track every iPhone user’s every move. LOL.
Anon
You don’t need Google Play – all the Gapps can be disabled. Try Fdroid and Cyanogen / AOSP. Works well with Orbot too.
Paul Ducklin
Cyanogen doesn’t really let you disable the Google Apps…it simply doesn’t include them because they’re proprietary, closed source components that aren’t redistributable in other Android distros.
Atlanticgrl
Anon – what is Fdroid? Is it an app to replace Google Play Services. I recently got a new Android (version 10), and the Google Play Services location cannot be turned off. IF I disable G Play S, the phone gets very angry, I cannot receive texts, Outlook won’t update, 3rd-party calendar won’t work, etc.
Larry M
Duck wrote “(On my device, the app known as Google Play Store had no special permissions whatsoever. I am assuming it acts merely the front end for the Play services app, which does the networking and geolocation part. So the ability to turn location data off for the Play Store app is a bit of a red herring, I suspect.)”
As I understand it:
–Google Play Store is merely a storefront for download of free and priced apps.
–Google Play Services provides update services for the Gapps family and any other apps downloaded from the Play Store.
Larry M
I wonder why this article was cited in the email newsletter two days in a row. Slow news day?
Sootie
Google does at least do something useful for everyone with this data (as well as whatever nefarious evil thing everyone seems to think they are doing with it), ever wonder how google maps traffic data is so damn accurate? Everyone with an Android phone who is on a road is providing real time traffic data to google.