Raising the bar on battery performance: excessive partial wake locks
Article Summary
Google Play is about to start penalizing apps that drain your users' batteries. Starting March 2026, excessive wake lock usage could get your app buried in search results or flagged with a warning label.
Karan Jhavar, Dan Brown, and Eric Brenner from Google announce that the excessive partial wake locks metric has graduated from beta to a core Android vitals metric. Developed in collaboration with Samsung, this metric identifies apps that hold wake locks for more than 2 cumulative hours in a 24-hour period, a major contributor to battery drain.
Key Takeaways
- Bad behavior threshold: 5% of user sessions exceeding 2 hours of wake locks
- Apps exceeding limits face reduced Play Store visibility starting March 1, 2026
- New wake lock names table shows P90/P99 durations for easier debugging
- Warning labels may appear on store listings for excessive battery drain
Apps with more than 5% of sessions holding wake locks for over 2 hours will face Play Store penalties and potential warning labels starting March 2026.
About This Article
Google and Samsung found that developers couldn't easily see which wake lock tags were draining battery the most. Apps use partial wake locks, but without clear visibility into individual tags, it's hard for developers to find and fix the problematic code.
Android vitals now includes a wake lock names table that breaks down sessions by specific tag names and shows P90/P99 duration metrics. Developers can use this in Android Studio to investigate any wake locks that run longer than 60 minutes in their local environment.
Samsung's real-world data helped shape this algorithm, which is now available to all developers as a core vitals metric. It gives developers better insight into how their apps use resources across the Android ecosystem.