Google is bringing a new Power Saving Mode to Google Maps that can significantly reduce your navigation battery drain, but there’s a downside most Android users won’t like, too. As it stands, the feature is limited to the Pixel 10 series—which includes Google’s own brand of phones that run on Android 10—but as an option for those longer drives or daily commutes, it’ll come in handy.
What Google Maps Power Saving Mode Really Does
The mode also switches your turn-by-turn navigation into a bare, black-and-white interface that lives on the Always-On Display. Instead of a map in full color with constant movement and data overlays, you just see the essentials—your next turn, how far away it is, and core status indicators. On Pixel 10, you can activate it when you’re navigating simply by pressing the power button—which dims the display, preserving your path guidance while doing so.
Google says this method can add up to four hours of battery life. That assertion is not too hard to believe: independent phone battery tests consistently show full-screen nav draining 10% or even upwards of 20% per hour (until advancements in that technology), depending on display brightness, connectivity, and terrain, while an Always-On Display on OLED refreshes under 1% per hour. By shunting guidance to an ultra-low-power state, Maps lops off the highest energy consumption; the bright, high-refresh screen needed for continuous directions.
Why Power Saving Mode Has a Pixel-Only Limitation
Under the hood, Maps uses a new Android feature called AOD Min Mode that lets an app show its full-screen activity on the Always-On Display. It’s not just a dim lock screen; it has a dedicated low-power rendering path, with reduced colors, lower brightness, and an aggressively throttled refresh rate specifically designed for OLED panels that can turn off black pixels altogether.
At the moment, that pipeline only works on Pixel 10. It’s not clear that Google is committed to backporting the feature to older Pixels, or opening the API up to let other phone manufacturers build it into their own software. Display stack-aware engineers note likely dependencies on Pixel 10’s display controller and power management firmware, which orchestrate the ultra-low-power mode without waking up the full graphics stack. This is, in other words, as much a hardware pathing issue as it is an Android feature flag.
The exclusivity is also consistent with a pattern we’ve seen before: Google will often introduce platform-level concepts on its latest Pixels before determining whether they’re ready to be generalized. Developers are keeping an eye out to see whether AOD Min Mode becomes a public API in a future edition of Android, which would let other apps (imagine Waze, cycling computers, or fitness trackers) surface glanceable—and battery-stingy—experiences on the AOD.
Who Wins and Who Loses From This Pixel-Only Feature
By the time the Pixel 10 arrives, there are gains today. For long-distance drivers, delivery couriers, and rideshare workers who remain for hours with navigation running, even a little preservation of the battery can result in real-world savings from needing to plug in less often, not to mention lower thermal cycling. The feature ought to be useful during walking and biking directions, too. Screen wake-ups are frequent in both, but almost never necessary.
For everyone else, the lack will hurt. The majority of Android phones will not receive this mode in the short term, and there is no official roadmap for wider support. Meanwhile, there are workarounds:
- Reduce screen brightness.
- Put Maps in its dark theme.
- Turn 3D buildings off.
- Download offline maps to avoid data fetching.
- Curtail Bluetooth accessories you aren’t using (or, better yet, connect them with wires).
- Enable system Battery Saver.
The best thing you can do while navigating is to keep the phone plugged in, but that’s not always practical or desirable.
Why This Power Saving Mode Matters for Android Users
Maps navigation is one of the most demanding everyday workloads you can put on a phone. It constantly uses GPS, network calls for directions, CPU work for rerouting, and keeps the display running at sustained brightness. Analyses by several analysts and reviewers show that, in these conditions, display power far outweighs the rest of the energy budget. AOD-based guidance is a clever, platform-level hack that trades some high-fidelity visuals for battery life without compromising on safety-critical cues.
The problem is access. By restricting Power Saving Mode to the Pixel 10, Google effectively makes a general-purpose, infrastructure-level enhancement into a hardware differentiator. That might be an acceptable way to launch a product, but it splinters the experience for Android users, where the best-behaved version of Maps is available to a tiny fraction.
The Road Ahead for AOD Min Mode and Google Maps
Open up AOD Min Mode to more devices and developers, and the benefits could go far beyond navigation—how about persistent workout stats, times to your next public transit departure, or even live safety alerts that sip power like never before. Until then, Power Saving Mode is a sharp showcase of what we can achieve from low-power UX—when it’s developed by and for only one Android device at a time.
