Google has announced that it is taking action against apps that drain your device’s battery. The company said that since March 1, it has been rolling out the wake lock technical quality treatments to improve the battery drain situation. This treatment will roll out to impacted apps in the coming weeks and those that consistently exceed the Excessive Partial Wake Lock threshold in Android vitals could see their store presence affected, including warnings on their store listing and or be excluded from recommendations.
In an example screenshot shared by Google of an app store listing with a battery usage warning, there is a big red box under the reviews, downloads, and rating that reads “This app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity”. If you are just looking around on the store for an app randomly, this definitely seems scary enough to keep people away, but people who have been directed to download the app will just probably have to endure it.
For an app to be put in Google’s bad books, it needs to cross the bad behavior threshold which is defined as holding a non-exempted partial wake lock for at least two hours on average while the screen is off in more than 5% of user sessions in the past 28 days. Exempted wake locks offer clear user benefits and can’t be further optimized like audio playback, location access, or user-initiated data transfer.
If you want to avoid being flagged in the Google Play Store, the blog post announcing this change has several tips that you can follow to optimize your app so that it uses the battery more efficiently. It goes over foreground services vs partial wake locks, third-party libraries acquiring wake locks, Bluetooth communication, location tracking, and more.
While this move is great for Android end users, it will create a headache for Android developers who constantly get badgered by Google to make sure this and that is right on their developer accounts and to ensure apps are targeting the right version of Android and more. Nevertheless, this may make Android more appealing to iPhone users looking to switch as apps over on iOS are already very efficient when it comes to battery life.