Several users of Chromebooks are reporting issues of 100% battery usage by PlayStore, after updating to ChromeOS 85.0.4183.108. While this isn’t affecting everyone, users of Acer, Asus and Samsung Chromebooks say the Google Playstore is using 100% of CPU for an extended period, even without any app updates. This was acknowledged by Google but didn’t assign to any engineer yet.
New ChromeOS Update Causing High CPU Usage
Google has made the Chrome department as a separate entity, with people working there independently to power all the Chrome-based products like Chrome browser, extensions and ChromeOS. While we expect the team to roll out a feature-full update periodically, few users report an issue with their CPU usage after updating to the ChromeOS 85.0.4183.108 or later.
Users complain about getting devices hot, apps and fans running wild and eventually draining the battery quickly. Few have studied internally to result in these actions as the high CPU usage. Especially, the Google Playstore service. Users reported the “com.android.vending:download_service” is using almost 100% of CPU for a longer period.
The service is destined for downloading the new updates whenever available, but was running harshly at the background even though there were no updates to download. This issue isn’t troubling all, but to those using ASUS Chromebook Flip, Acer Chromebooks and Galaxy Chromebooks.
A Google engineer in a bug report said: “After review, users are experiencing this behaviour because CrOS is unable to determine delta changes in UID proc times due to missing files.” While the issues were acknowledged by Google, it didn’t allocate any engineer to fix this yet. Thus, we have to wait until a patch arrives.
Until then, user tried workarounds like killing the Playstore service from the Chrome Task Manager manually or rolling back to the old Playstore version may work. While these are temporary fixes, Google may soon come up with a fix in next its ChromeOS update.
