It happens to all of us: we get to the afternoon with a nearly dead phone and we have no idea why. Android battery drain is a real thing, and it’s been a top Android complaint for years.
Apparently, Google has been listening, as it started laying down the law. As of March 1, the Google Play Store started rolling out what it calls “wake lock technical quality enforcement,” which basically means it will flag, warn, and de-prioritize anyone finding apps that kill your battery.
What’s a wake lock, and why does it matter?
When your phone screen turns off, the CPU is supposed to lower its activity to conserve power. A wake lock prevents that from happening, keeping the processor running in the background even if you’re not using your phone. Think apps like Spotify (to keep the music playing even when your phone is locked) or Google Maps (to track your location). Apparently, though, many apps hold a wake lock for less useful reasons, like background syncing on by default, a fitness app that keeps running on the CPU even when you haven’t touched it in days, or a social media app refreshing your feed in the background. These are the behaviors that Google is now targeting.
“The ‘bad behavior threshold’ is defined as holding a non-exempted partial wake lock for at leasttwo hours on average while the screen is off in more than5% of user sessionsin thepast 28 days,” wrote the company in its developer blog post.The company will exempt apps that use a wake lock if it is a “system-held wake lock that offers clear user benefits” that can’t be dealt with in any other way. Google offers audio playback, location access, or user-initiated data transfers as examples.Apps that blow past this threshold regularly could see a warning label appear on their Play Store listing, which will be visible to anyhone looking to download that app. The app might also be excluded from discovery features like the Play Store recommendations page or curated collections. The listing will essentially become invisible until the developers fix the problem and resubmit the app, sans wake lock issues.
The apps most likely to be affected
Google walks through s4everal situations in which devs can fix this battery drain issue.
User-initiated uploads or downloads, like video streaming or media backup apps, where the app uses a wake lock to keep the data transfer active. Google says to use its User-Initiated Data Transfer (UIDT) API to do the same thing, but avoid the blunt wake lock instrument.
One-time or periodic background syncs that back up your photos or sync data in the background shouldn’t use wake lock either, according to Google. Instead, the company suggests Android’s WorkManager, which can batch background tasks more intelligently than the broad brush of wake lock.
Bluetooth companion apps that prompt you to pair your Bluetooth device or stay active, listening for hardware events on your external device. Some might initiate file transfers or update firmware. The use of wake lock, says Google, should be replaced with companion device pairing and implement steps in the Communicate in the background developer guidance to make sure this is done right. WorkManager, again, is a way devs can manage it with an eye to battery consumption, while wake lock can. be used, but only for the duration of the activity itself.
Other apps in the warning line include location tracking apps (like fitness apps or food delivery apps), apps that rely on high frequency sensor monitoring (like pedometer apps or safety apps), and remote messaging apps. Google offers suggestions to devs for each of these situations, which will let apps avoid using wake lock instead of more battery-efficient systems built into Android.
What this means for you as an Android user
The change you’ll likely see more immediately is a warning label on some apps in the Play Store, like if you go in there looking for a specific app that has been recommended to you. If an app has been flagged for excessive battery drain, Google will drop a little notification label on the listing. That’s an app you’ll want to avoid if there are other alternatives.
Over time, once developers comply (and they should since discovery is key for mobile app business), you’ll likely see measurably better improvements in how long your phone can last on a single charge. We can all get behind that.
In the meantime, you can manage your own battery better by checking to see which apps are consuming power in the background. Simply head into Settings > Battery > Battery usage and either view by app to see the offending apps or by systems (on a Pixel, anyway) to see what’s using the most battery on your phone. You can restrict anything showing a high background drain right there.
But is this enough?
Sure, it’s great that Google is warning developers off from unnecessarily using a potentially battery-draining system like wake lock. It’s a genuine quality metric that affects users in a significant way. Still, it’s also only developer-facing. Users cant report excessive wake lock behavior directly, and the system relies on a month-long data cycle. That means your battery drain issue isn’t going away any time soon. Apple has enforced strict background activity limits for years on iOS, making this more of a catch-up than a breakthrough innovation.
Bottom line, though, for a platform as fragmented as Android, with implementations across thousands of device models and millions of apps developed by diverse teams, this is a good start. Creating a Play Store consequence for battery drain via background activity via wake lock is a great first step, and could have positive, real-world consequences for all of us.
