By Bill Toulas
Publication Date: 2025-11-16 15:15:00
Google will start taking action on Android apps in the official Google Play store that have high background activity and cause excessive battery draining.
Apps that exceed a “bad behavior threshold” may be flagged on Google Play for negatively impacting battery performance and may affect their visibility in the Android ecosystem.
Developers have until March 1, 2026, to update their apps to comply with a new core Android Vitals metric called “excessive partial wake locks.”
The algorithm has been in beta since April 14, and Google developed it in close collaboration with Samsung.
“This is the first in a series of new metrics designed to provide deeper insight into your app’s resource utilization, enabling you to improve the experience for your users across the entire Android ecosystem,” Google announced.
Apps that go beyond the bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks may be flagged as battery drainers on Google Play and could be excluded “from…
