Google Play Store to Start Penalizing Apps That Drain Too Much Battery

Google wants to improve the Android app ecosystem by encouraging developers to ensure their apps aren’t consuming too much battery. In collaboration with Samsung, the company created a new metric to identify excessive battery drain, and apps that don’t meet a certain threshold will be penalized on the Google Play Store.

‘Excessive partial wake locks’ is the new metric Google added to the technical quality bars that all Android apps on the Google Play Store must meet. Android apps can hold wake locks to prevent a device from entering sleep mode, which allows some actions to be performed in the background when the screen is off. However, excessive wake lock sessions can be a heavy contributor to battery drain.

Google now “considers a user session excessive if it holds more than 2 cumulative hours of non-exempt wake locks in a 24 hour period.” Android apps will also cross Google’s bad behaviour threshold when 5% of their user sessions over the last 28 days are excessive.

“If your title exceeds the bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks, it may be ineligible for some discovery surfaces where users find new apps and games. In some cases, we may also show a warning on your store listing to inform users that your app may cause their device’s battery to drain faster,” Google explained yesterday.

These new rules impacting the Google Play visibility of apps that exceed the bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks will go into effect on March 1, 2026. In the meantime, Google invites developers to check out the Android Vitals portal to ensure that their apps meet Google Play’s core technical quality metrics. A new wake lock names table is available to help developers investigate excessive wake lock issues.