If there’s one thing all of us 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 reach a charger again.
There are many reasons your smartphone’s battery might drain fast, but some of the likeliest culprits are poorly-designed apps. Some of these programs use too much processing power when you’re actively using them, while others needlessly run in the background. You can always check your device’s battery stats to see which apps are the worst offenders, but what if you know know an app was a battery anchor before downloading it in the first place?
The Play Store’s new battery warnings
As of March 1, 2026, that will be the new reality. In just a few months, when you tap on an app in the Play Store, you might see a new alert that wasn’t there before. Underneath the usual details, like the app’s name, developer, reviews, and rating, you’ll see a red warning, stating something to the effect of, “This app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity.” I don’t know about you, but that would get me thinking twice about downloading it.
According to the Android Developer Blog, this has been in the works for some time. 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 “excessively” wake the display. Following this beta program, Google says it refined the algorithm it uses to calculate this rating, and has now rolled out the metric to all developers.
Going forward, if an app wakes the screen for a total of two hours in any given 24 hour period, Google will note it as excessive. If 5% of an app’s user sessions are excessive over a 28 day period, it crosses the “bad behavior threshold.” This can result in a number of different consequences for the app: Google may first pull it from discovery surfaces in the Play Store. That could seriously impact an app’s total installs, as users won’t find it without searching for the app directly. Of course, Google may also affix the app’s Play Store page with the aforementioned battery alert, which will also discourage users from downloading it.
What do you think so far?
The onus is now on app developers to correct this “bad behavior” in their apps by March of next year. Hopefully, any battery hogs on your smartphone will be fixed in the next few months, but if not, keep an eye on their Play Store pages. If you see this alert, you might want to uninstall the app entirely.
This isn’t the first time the Play Store rolled out a feature to root out bad apps. Last year, the marketplace launched live threat detection to highlight apps that might be spreading malware. The Play Store has also tested alerts that would warn you about apps that are frequently uninstalled, or that have a significantly lower active user count than competitor apps.
