The Google Play Store Wants to Help Preserve Your Battery
If there’s one thing we all smartphone owners have in common, it’s that our devices rarely have enough battery life. Some phones are better than others, especially when paired with battery-saving settings, but in general, it’s a universal anxiety to feel like your phone might die before you have access to a charger again.
There are many reasons why your smartphone battery may be draining quickly, but some of the most likely causes are poorly designed apps. Some of these programs use too much processing power when you’re actively using them, while others run unnecessarily in the background. You can always check your device’s battery stats to see which apps are the worst offenders, but what if you knew an app was a battery anchor before you downloaded it in the first place?
The new Play Store battery warnings
As of March 1, 2026, this will be the new reality. In just a few months, when you tap an app in the Play Store, you might see a new alert that wasn’t there before. Below the usual details, such as app name, developer, reviews, and rating, you’ll see a red warning saying something like: “This app may be using more battery than expected due to high background activity.” I don’t know about you, but that would make me think twice about downloading it.
According to the Android Developer Blog, this has been in the works for a while. In partnership with Samsung, the company rolled out a new metric in beta earlier this year called “excessive partial wake locks,” which aimed to reveal to developers when their apps are “excessively” waking the screen. Following this beta program, Google says it has refined the algorithm it uses to calculate this rating and has now rolled out the metric to all developers.
In the future, if an app wakes the screen for a total of two hours in a given 24-hour period, Google will consider it excessive. If 5% of an app’s user sessions are excessive over a 28-day period, it exceeds the “bad behavior threshold.” This can result in a number of different consequences for the app: Google may first remove it from the Play Store’s discovery surfaces. This could have a serious impact on an app’s total install count, as users won’t find it without searching for the app directly. Of course, Google may also put the aforementioned battery alert on the app’s Play Store page, which will also discourage users from downloading it.
The onus is now on app developers to fix this “bad behavior” in their apps by March next year. Hopefully your smartphone battery issues will be resolved in the next few months, but otherwise, keep an eye on their Play Store pages. If you see this alert, you may want to uninstall the app completely.
This is not the first time that the Play Store has rolled out a feature to eliminate bad apps. Last year, the market launched live threat detection to highlight applications that might be spreading malware. The Play Store also tested alerts that would notify you of apps that are frequently uninstalled or have a significantly lower number of active users than competing apps.
