Google Reveals Culprit For Android Battery Drain Bug Following Its May Update

Diagnosing mystery battery drain issues on a smartphone can be frustrating. Broadly speaking, per-app battery usage indicators aren't all that useful, since they only count usage by the core of the app itself; system call usage usually gets lumped into "System", "Other", or similar nebulous categories.

This is precisely the reason why a recent mystery juice-draining event was taking place across a portion of the Android handset world. It turns out that the culprit was some poor coding on behalf of the Instagram app, The interesting bit of this is that the problem was widespread enough to garner attention from Google itself, as it posted a very plain page on its Community help website, asking users to update Instagram to the latest version.

The page doesn't offer any other details, particularly about the actual root cause (if there is one) or whether the affected devices are only its ...