Google Play Store to Show Warnings on Apps Causing Excessive Battery Drain

Google is bringing a new Play Store policy aimed at flagging apps that significantly impact the battery life of your devices. Beginning next year, apps that cause excessive battery drain may display a warning on their Play Store listing, potentially discouraging users from downloading them. These apps could also be excluded from key discovery areas. Google will specifically target apps that misuse the “wake locks” feature, which prevents the device from sleeping even when the screen is off.

Google to Address Excessive App Battery Drain

Google, through its Android Developers Blog, has announced that starting March 1, 2026, the Play Store will display warnings on app listings that cause excessive battery drain. Affected apps will also be excluded from the prominent discovery surfaces, such as recommendations.

Wake locks are used to keep a handset awake during background tasks even when the screen is off. Google considers a user session excessive if it exceeds two hours of non-exempt wake locks within a 24-hour period. Such behaviour will significantly impact battery life. Google offers exemptions that apply to system-level wake locks, which provide clear user benefits, such as audio playback or user-initiated data transfer.

Google states that an app will be flagged for poor performance if more than 5 percent of its user sessions in 28 days exceed this threshold. In such cases, developers will be notified via the Android Vitals overview page, allowing them to address the issue before facing possible visibility penalties on the Play Store.

Excessive wake locks
Photo Credit: Android Developers Blog

If an app crosses Google's bad behaviour threshold for excessive wake locks, it might be excluded from the discovery features. Additionally, Google will display a warning, “This app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity,” in red on the app's Play Store listing to alert users that the app may cause faster battery drain.

Google acknowledges that updating an app's code to address battery drain issues can be time-consuming, so the tech giant is now providing developers with early access to this metric. This gives developers time to examine their apps against the “excessive partial wake locks” metric, which is part of the "core technical quality metrics" and resolve potential problems before the Play Store starts applying visibility changes from March 1, 2026.

Google introduced the "excessive wake locks" metric to the Android Vitals dashboard in the Play Console earlier this year. The battery metric is co-developed with Samsung.