Raising the bar on battery performance: excessive partial wake locks metric is now out of beta

Posted by Karan Jhavar - Product Manager, Android Frameworks, Dan Brown - Product Manager, Google Play, and Eric Brenner - Software Engineer, Google Play A great user experience is built on a foundation of strong technical performance. We are committed to helping you create stable, responsive, and efficient apps that users love. Excessive battery drain is top of mind for your users, and together, we are taking significant steps to help you build more power-efficient apps.

Earlier this year, we introduced a new beta metric in Android vitals, excessive partial wake locks , to help you identify and address sources of battery drain. This initial beta metric was co-developed in close collaboration with Samsung , combining their deep, real-world insights into user experience with battery consumption with Android's platform data. We want to thank you for providing invaluable feedback during the beta period.

Powered by your input and our continued collaboration with Samsung, we have further refined the algorithm to be even more accurate and representative. We are excited to announce that this refined metric is now generally available as a new core vitals metric to all developers in Android vitals. We have defined a bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks.

Starting March 1, 2026, if your title does not meet this quality threshold, we may exclude the title from prominent discovery surfaces such as recommendations. In some cases, we may display a warning on your store listing to indicate to users that your app may cause excessive battery drain. GOOGLE PLAY'S CORE TECHNICAL QUALITY METRICS To maximize visibility on Google Play, keep your app below the bad behavior thresholds for these metrics.

44% per hour New: Excessive partial wake locks The percentage of user sessions where cumulative, non-exempt wake lock usage exceeds 2 hours Excessive partial wake locks newly join the technical quality bars that Play expects all titles to maintain for a great user experience This is the first in a series of new metrics designed to provide deeper insight into your app's resource utilization, enabling you to improve the experience for your users across the entire Android ecosystem. 1. Aligning our definition of excessive wake locks with user expectations Apps can hold wake locks to prevent the user's device from entering sleep mode, letting the apps perform background work while the screen is off.

We consider a user session excessive if it holds more than 2 cumulative hours of non-exempt wake locks in a 24 hour period. These excessive sessions are a heavy contributor to battery drain. A wake lock is exempted if it is a system held wake lock that offers clear user benefits that cannot be further optimized, such as audio playback or user-initiated data transfer.