{"id":130076,"date":"2025-11-11T20:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T20:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/130076\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T20:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T20:04:09","slug":"google-is-clamping-down-on-android-apps-that-cause-excessive-battery-drain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/130076\/","title":{"rendered":"Google is clamping down on Android apps that cause excessive battery drain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">It can be tough to know when a phone is on its deathbed or when an app is just being an overt battery hog. Google is going to help users get to the bottom of things, according to a recent <a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/android-developers.googleblog.com\/2025\/11\/raising-bar-on-battery-performance.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:Android Developers Blog;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">Android Developers Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">The company just announced the launch of a new metric for app developers that keeps an eye on battery usage. If a developer consistently runs afoul of Google&#8217;s battery usage guidelines, a warning will pop up in the Play Store to alert end users.<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"A Play Store warning.\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"945\" height=\"848\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"fig-image-round\" style=\"color:transparent\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1faa0690-bf2f-11f0-b7ff-58cb4f7e21f2.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Google<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">This metric will keep a particular eye on so-called wake locks, which is when smartphones are prevented from entering sleep mode by battery-hungry apps that want to run background processes when the screen is off. Google says wake locks are a &#8220;heavy contributor to battery drain&#8221; and has developed a threshold for what is deemed acceptable for apps running in the background.<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">This threshold &#8220;considers a user session excessive if it holds more than two cumulative hours of non-exempt wake locks in a 24 hour period.&#8221; There are exemptions if the background process offers &#8220;clear user benefits&#8221; with examples given of audio playback and user-initiated data transfers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">If a developer doesn&#8217;t fix the underlying wake lock issue, they get slapped with a visible warning. The Play Store label says that &#8220;this app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity.&#8221; That will likely turn off potential downloaders. I certainly wouldn&#8217;t pop one of those apps on my phone.<\/p>\n<p class=\"col-body mb-4 leading-7 text-[18px] md:leading-8 break-words min-w-0 charcoal-color\">Google will go a step further in some cases, making the offending apps ineligible for certain discovery sections within the Play Store. These rules go into effect on March 1, so we only have a few more months to experience just how quickly an Android phone can go from a full battery to completely dead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It can be tough to know when a phone is on its deathbed or when an app is&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[771,89886,89884,367,111,139,69,89885,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-130076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-android","9":"tag-app-developers","10":"tag-battery-usage","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-play-store","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}