Google Play Store to warn about battery-draining Android apps
▼ Summary
– Google will flag Android apps on Google Play that exceed a “bad behavior threshold” for excessive battery draining due to high background activity.
– Developers must update their apps by March 1, 2026, to comply with a new Android Vitals metric called “excessive partial wake locks.”
– The policy measures non-exempt wake locks, considering behavior excessive when a single user session holds over two cumulative hours of such locks within 24 hours.
– Apps exceeding the threshold may have reduced visibility on Google Play and be excluded from prominent discovery surfaces like recommendations.
– Google clarified that this metric targets resource consumption issues to improve battery performance, not primarily to detect malware or spyware.
Google is introducing a new system within the Play Store to identify and flag Android applications that drain device batteries through excessive background activity. This initiative aims to improve user experience by highlighting apps with poor power management. Apps surpassing a defined “bad behavior threshold” for background resource use may find their visibility reduced on the platform, potentially affecting their discoverability in recommendations and search results.
Developers have a deadline of March 1, 2026, to update their software and comply with a fresh Android Vitals metric targeting “excessive partial wake locks.” This algorithm, developed in partnership with Samsung, has been undergoing beta testing since mid-April. Google describes this as the initial step in a broader plan to offer developers deeper insights into how their apps consume system resources, empowering them to enhance performance for users across the diverse Android device landscape.
Applications that cross the established threshold for excessive wake locks risk being publicly labeled as battery drainers on their Play Store listing. More significantly, they could be omitted from key discovery areas, including personalized recommendations. The Android vitals system will specifically monitor partial wake locks, which occur when an app performs background tasks with the screen off, preventing the device from entering a low-power sleep state.
Measurement will focus on the cumulative time an app holds non-exempt wake locks during a user session and across all sessions within a 28-day period. Non-exempt wake locks are those not held by the system itself, unrelated to audio playback, or not initiated by a direct user action like a file transfer. An app’s behavior is deemed excessive when any single user session accumulates more than two hours of these non-exempt wake locks within a 24-hour span.
The bad-behavior threshold is set at 5% of an app’s total user sessions over the previous 28 days exhibiting this excessive activity. Developers whose applications exceed this level will be notified via an alert on their Android Vitals overview page, giving them an opportunity to make necessary optimizations.
This policy shift is expected to compel developers to refine their code, minimize unnecessary wake locks, release them promptly after tasks are complete, and scrutinize wake locks triggered by third-party libraries and software development kits (SDKs). While this feature could theoretically detect certain types of malware that prevent sleep to maintain data connections, Google clarified that this is not its primary purpose.
The company emphasized that app security remains a fundamental priority on Google Play, but the main goal of this specific metric is to elevate battery performance and overall technical quality for a better user experience. This measure is designed to target problematic behavior characterized by excessive resource consumption, regardless of whether an app is malicious. By enforcing these thresholds, Google aims to identify and act against applications that abuse system resources without delivering clear value to the user, though it is not principally intended as an anti-malware tool.
(Source: Bleeping Computer)
