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Android has several powerful features that help users do more, but they don’t impact everyone equally because not everyone needs or uses them. This is why nailing the basics is important, as more people, if not everybody, benefits from it. Google’s latest Play Store changes are also directed at that.
Google Play Store now has a smart feature that helps you save your phone’s battery without you realizing it. The new changes don’t require any action from the users, but if you are a developer, you must pay attention to the details, because failing to do so might drastically impact your …
Sign in to your Android Police account
Android has several powerful features that help users do more, but they don’t impact everyone equally because not everyone needs or uses them. This is why nailing the basics is important, as more people, if not everybody, benefits from it. Google’s latest Play Store changes are also directed at that.
Google Play Store now has a smart feature that helps you save your phone’s battery without you realizing it. The new changes don’t require any action from the users, but if you are a developer, you must pay attention to the details, because failing to do so might drastically impact your app installs.
What are Google’s latest Google Play changes that impact your phone’s battery?
While battery capacity has a big say on how long your phone will last on a single charge, you can save your phone’s battery life by following certain best practices. One of those is not installing anything that drains your battery excessively without justifying the power it consumes. With Google Play’s latest changes, it’ll be super easy for users to spot those apps on the Play Store.
Credit: Google
Starting March 1, 2026, the Google Play Store will start showing a warning on app store listings for apps that cause excessive battery drain. This warning message will likely make a lot of users turn away from the app and look for a better alternative. You might not be able to find those warnings very often, because Google will exclude those apps from prominent discovery surfaces, such as recommendations.
To make things easier for developers, Google Play has also announced what will trigger the warning and impact the app discoverability. According to the company’s official blog post (via 9to5Google), the warning message appears if 5% of an app’s sessions over the last 28 days are excessive. This is when the app exceeds what Google calls the “bad behavior threshold.”
When will Google call a user session excessive, you ask? Well, according to the company, excessive sessions are those that hold more than ‘2 cumulative hours of non-exempt wake locks in a 24-hour period.’ Google will push an alert on your Android vitals overview page when your app exceeds the threshold. You can read more about the changes on the Android Developers Blog.
If you are a developer, you have until March to review your app’s performance on the new excessive partial wake locks metric and fix issues that might trigger the warning. The “excessive partial wake locks” is now one of the “core technical quality metrics,” and is available to all Android developers.