Your Android phone is checking location 500+ times daily—here's how to stop it

Published Sep 26, 2026, 7:30 PM EDT Vishwamoorthy's interest in tech started early, as a school student, watching Pixel 2 XL camera review videos and being awestruck by what a phone camera with excellent software could do. That curiosity stuck with him: since 2022, he's published over 1,500 articles covering smartphones, Android, and consumer tech news at FoneArena, one of India's leading tech publications. Lately, he's obsessed with how AI is reshaping the business world, the deals, the products, the quiet feature rollouts nobody notices until they're everywhere. Reading and writing about tech is what keeps him going; doomscrolling is what keeps him honest. The average battery capacity of an Android phone has increased from around 3000 mAh in 2015 to 5291 mAh in January 2026, with certain Chinese OEMs now reaching up to 10,000 mAh in mainstream smartphones. While battery capacity and tech are growing at a rapid pace, so is the power consumption of Android apps. In fact, I charge my device about as often as I did in the old days. So I did investigate my phone's battery consumption and found that the idle battery drain was surprisingly high (around 12% overnight drain). The main culprit was frequent location access by apps like Instagram, which recorded 500+ location accesses in just 24 hours. The 500-ping wake-up call in location permission history Why your phone is never truly in deep sleep My investigation around battery drain revealed that some non‑essential apps (like Instagram) were accessing my location frequently, that too in the background. I found this through Android's native Privacy Dashboard, which keeps track of all apps that have access permissions such as location, camera, and microphone, and when that access occurred. At the time of writing this, my privacy dashboard says, "10 apps used [location] 566 times in the past 24 hours." That's around 24 times every hour, and every ping consumes power. While not every access event represents a GPS request, frequent background location access, even through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, can contribute to battery drain. With a few settings tweaks, like restricting app location and more, I was able to reclaim a considerable amount of battery life out of my smartphone usage. The "While using the app" loophole How cached apps and foreground services bypass restrictions When granting permissions to an app, we often choose “While using the app” for location access. While it may seem like the right choice, there are some nuances worth knowing. As I mentioned earlier, Instagram was accessing my location quite frequently. The privacy dashboard even showed the "Background access" label for Instagram, with location-access events appearing at multiple timestamps. When investigating this, I realized that I often don't clear background apps on my phone, and social media apps can perform certain background activities on Android — accessing a precise or approximate location is one such event — when cached temporarily. In my case, when I swipe to the home screen without closing Instagram, the app performs tasks like background sync jobs that try to fetch a precise or approximate location, which ultimately drains the battery. Disabling precise GPS tracking permission on non-essential apps Save battery by giving apps your approximate location Every location request wakes up the CPU from the idle/doze state, turns on radios (cellular, Wi‑Fi, and sometimes GNSS), and triggers network calls to send that location to servers. Repeated wakeups for location + network sync keep the SoC and radios from entering the deepest sleep states, increasing idle drain. Restricting non‑essential apps (like Instagram) to “Ask every time” and disabling precise location often yields a noticeable improvement in standby battery. To do so, head on to your settings on your Android device and search for the term Security and Privacy. Under that menu, you can access the Permission Usage History option, which shows you apps that have accessed your location, camera, and microphone in the past 24 hours. Go into Location to see when apps accessed your location. Tapping an app takes you to its Location permission page, where you can adjust its access. I personally switched social apps such as Instagram and Snapchat to Ask every time or allow when you share mode for social apps, as they were accessing my location in the foreground and background quite often. I also disabled Use Precise Location for apps that don't need my exact location, reducing CPU load. Disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning Stop your phone from searching for networks in the background Well, if you think turning off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggle on Quick Settings immediately disables the antennas to preserve the battery, you're wrong. Google Play Services relies on them to get your approximate location when the precise location is off. So, by default, Android keeps these antennas at a low-power state to scan your environment for known Wi-Fi router MAC addresses and Bluetooth Low Energy beacons. While this feature can be useful in crowded environments and dense urban areas, it can also contribute to background location access activities. This eventually creates a backdoor for social apps that rely on approximate location when running in the background. If you've set the location permission for non-essential apps to "ask every time," disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning is another step you can take to reduce unnecessary scanning. To disable them, navigate to Settings, search for the term "location," enter the menu, and find the Location Services option. Under that, you'll find Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning enabled by default. Turning them off will improve your battery life significantly. Less location scanning equals more battery life After two full days of restricting the background location access, I noticed a significant improvement in battery life. By the end of the day, I was comfortably left with around 25–30% battery life instead of the usual 12–15%, which translates to roughly two hours of additional battery life. While I can't attribute all of this improvement solely to the reduction in location-access events, slashing those 500+ daily location requests has certainly helped reduce the idle battery drain of my device.