How to Turn Off the Google Now Feed to Save Some Battery Life

If you want to save some battery life, or just don’t need the feature, then you can follow these steps to turn off the Google Now Feed.

Update 2 – Google has now officially rebranded the Google Now Feed into what they’re calling Google Discover. This means the name has changed but the end goal of using the company’s machine learning technology to suggest content for you to read is still the same. With this change hopefully being in its final form, I have written yet another tutorial to show you how to turn off the Google Now Feed which is now being called Google Discover.

Update – Some people are saying the guide detailed below on this page has finally started to work again. Since this method is easier to do I recommend you scroll down and follow those steps to see if it works for you (again). However, if that toggle isn’t there for you then that means your Google App hasn’t been updated (which could even be a server-side switch) and if that is the case then you can follow this guide on how to disable the Google Feed.

While many are looking forward to using Google Assistant, some have forgotten about the predictive assistant Google introduced a while back called Google Now. This feature learns your habits and does its best to predict what you’re about to do next. So for example, it can learn that you always leave for work at 7:15, but then warn you about a traffic jam at 7:00 so that you’ll know to leave a little bit earlier than you normally woulds so you can be on time.

There’s a number of things Google Now does, but to be predictive like this, it actually needs a lot of data to work properly.

This means the service is running in the background (even when your phone or tablet is locked), and can actually cause wakelocks to prevent your device from staying in a deep sleep mode. This ends up using your battery and it’s just a trade off to have all of the feature that Google Now offers. However, some people don’t care for these features and would rather have the extra battery life.

So let me show you how to turn off the Google Now feed so that your device will use less battery.

Turn Off Google Now Feed

1. Open the App Drawer
2. Tap on the Google application to launch it
3. Tap on the Hamburger Menu icon at the top left of the screen
4. Tap on the Settings option
5. Tap on the Your Feed option
6. Tap on the Feed toggle at the very top
7. Then tap on the Turn Off button when prompted
8. Choose whether or not you want the Google Now Feed disabled across all devices (optional)
9. And press the Home button to go back to the Home Screen

Explanation

There are a lot of suggestions like, turning off Bluetooth or location services, that will help you save battery life. The thing is, a lot of people use Bluetooth and location services and feel that turning these things off will ‘turn their smartphone into a dumbphone’. That’s a valid claim and many will simply suggest things these because they actually do save you battery life and we all use our devices differently. I feel this is different with Google Now because very few people use it to its fullest extent.

Google Now is one of those features that become invaluable once you get used to it, but it’s rather difficult to get the average person to use it on a daily basis. So for most people, the turning off the Google Now Feed will not limit the functionality of their device at all. Still, it’s just a suggestion and you should be able to make up your mind about whether or not disabling this feature will be worth the extra battery life or not.

So to start, you’ll want to launch the Google application (which is generally found in the App Drawer since few people have it on their Home Scree). We need to extend the Navigation Menu by either tapping on the Hamburger Menu icon at the top left or swiping in from the left side of the screen. From here, simply tap on the Settings option to go into the settings section of the Google application. There are a lot of options to choose from here, but we just want to tap on the Your Feed option right now.

This will bring you to another screen with a lot of options, and you can configure these if you still want to use the Google Now Feed. If you don’t though, simply tap on the Feed toggle at the top of the screen. This will generally be on by default, and we want to turn it off so that it isn’t running in the background all of the time. Once you toggle the feature off, you’ll be asked if you’re sure you want to disable this feature, and if you want to disable it across all of your devices.

I like to use Google Now on one device, but don’t need it running on all of my other ones. So I keep this optional check box unchecked, and then just tap on the Turn Off button to turn it off on this one particular device. So for example, I don’t need the Google Now Feed running on my tablet so I turn it off on that device only. If you don’t want it activated on any of your devices, then you can tap on the check box and then tap on the Turn Off button.