Google Play Policy Change Puts Android Devs On Notice Over Battery Drain

Android apps will soon be facing penalties for excess battery drain on the Play Store, but developers will be made aware of these issues and have time to fix them before they are penalized, per Google's latest Android Developers Blog post. This effort follows last year's addition of a beta metric to Android vitals dubbed "excessive partial wake locks," which was co-developed with Samsung and has since been refined to be available to all Android developers within Android vitals. The metric has defined a bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks, and could have major ramifications on an app's Play Store listing if actions aren't taken before March of 2026.

Excessive wake locks refer to when an application "holds more than 2 cumulative hours of non-exempt wake locks in a 24 hour period," with the exception of audio playback or user-initiated data transfers. A wake lock ...