TL;DR: Short battery life and excessive power use remain two of the biggest complaints about modern smartphones. Google is attempting to address both in Android by shifting responsibility to app developers, who will now need to monitor their apps' energy consumption more closely or risk being penalized on the Play Store.
Google is asking developers to "raise the bar" on battery efficiency. New Android metrics will give programmers deeper insight into how their apps consume power – but they'll need to act quickly. Apps that drain excessive energy without justification will soon face reduced visibility on the Play Store.
Google's latest effort to improve user experience centers on excessive partial wake locks (EPWL), an Android metric introduced in beta earlier this year. Developed in collaboration with Samsung, EPWL tracks when an app prevents a device from entering sleep mode. Under normal conditions, background apps should complete their tasks while the screen is off to help conserve power.
Over the past few months, Google and Samsung have refined the EPWL algorithm to reflect real-world usage more accurately. The companies have set a threshold for apps that excessively block a device's normal sleep cycle: any app triggering EPWL for more than two cumulative hours in 24 hours, across at least 5 percent of user sessions over the past 28 days, will exceed that limit.
Google's system will notify developers of problematic apps through the Android Vitals dashboard. Beginning March 1, 2026, Mountain View will also exclude these apps from Play Store discovery features that promote visibility. Users will see a warning that the app consumes excessive power due to "high background activity."
The EPWL metric now joins a series of quality benchmarks Android developers must monitor to maintain visibility on Google Play. Other key metrics include user-perceived crash rate, user-perceived ANR (Application Not Responding) rate, and excessive battery usage – excluding background operations.
Google acknowledges that improving an app's vitals metrics can be challenging – especially for developers who struggle to identify the source of performance issues in their code. The new EPWL metric should make it easier to pinpoint excessive power consumption, giving software designers time to prepare before the upcoming policy changes take effect.
Mountain View is clearly working to reduce battery-related issues across the Android ecosystem. The company recently faced a series of incidents involving overheating batteries on its Pixel line of premium smartphones. Forced firmware updates, which degraded battery performance, were apparently insufficient to prevent some of these problems.