14 DAY TRIAL // Multiple users have reported on Reddit and to Android Police that their Android 9 Pie phones suddenly had power saving mode enabled even though they were nowhere near a low battery charge state.
As revealed by Google's employees after the incident took place, the battery saver feature of smartphones running the latest version of Android powered by artificial intelligence was remotely and accidentally enabled on more devices than planned due to an internal experiment.
"Some of you may have noticed that battery saver turned on automatically today. This was an internal experiment to test battery saving features that was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended," said a Google official on Reddit. "We have now rolled battery saver settings back to default. Please configure to your liking. Sorry for the confusion."
The battery saver feature will stop apps from refreshing content until accessed, blocks apps from performing background tasks unless battery optimization is turned off, and shuts down Location services when the screen is off.
Although the statement was made by PixelCommunity, an official Google Reddit account and the reports initially said that only Google Pixel phones were affected by the battery saving experiment, further reports surfaced stating that other phone models also had the power saving mode remotely turned on.
The power saving mode internal Google experiment was enabled by accident on more devices than intended
Even though users of Nokia 7+ (Pie beta), and OnePlus 6 (Pie beta), and Essential Phone also had their devices automatically enrolled in Google's internal experiment and the number of reports keeps growing, Google did not offer any other information besides what they published on Reddit.
According to some of the people affected, the change was performed using Google's Play Services installed on all smartphones running a vanilla Android OS with the "Allow modify system settings" feature enabled.
The feature can be disabled by going into the Settings > Apps > Configure Apps (gear button) menu and unchecking the modify system settings entry.
Be warned though that you are solely responsible if this change brakes things and Google's Android services or other apps will no longer work properly.