Google has defined a new bad behavior threshold for excessive wake locks on Android, which means a new warning is coming to apps on Google Play if they might present excessive battery drain. The time has come for developers to stop messing around in the background on your device and killing your battery.
The Android Developers team shared a write-up on the new threshold this week, saying that come March 1, 2026, they may take some action against developer apps or at least begin warning end users (like you and I) if an application might put a strain on their battery. This new metric was created in collaboration with Samsung and is now a part of the core vitals metric for developers to meet on Android.
Here’s how Google shared the news:
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.
The full write-up on this new threshold can be found at the link below, but the basics are that Google now considers an excessive amount of wake locks to be more than 2 cumulative hours within a 24 hour period. That said, there are some exemptions here, if an app can somehow prove that its wake locks offer “clear user benefits that cannot be further optimized” – like audio playback and user-initiated data transfers.
So there you have it on excessive battery drain from wake locks in the background of your phone. If developers don’t meet the new bad behavior threshold, Google will take action against them.
Will Google monitor their own apps? None of my individual app usage adds up to anything – something system related seems to be chewing up all my watts.
Amazing