Google has found a new way to shame battery-hogging apps before you even install them
Google has introduced a new Play Store feature that warns users about apps causing excessive battery drain due to background activity. The warnings are based on data showing apps holding partial wake locks for more than two hours in a 24-hour period across multiple user sessions. This change positions battery efficiency as a core measure of app quality, alongside stability and performance.
- ▪Google now flags apps that hold partial wake locks for over two hours in a 24-hour period while the screen is off.
- ▪The flagging system requires the behavior to occur in more than 5% of user sessions over a 28-day average before triggering a warning.
- ▪Certain functions like audio playback, active location tracking, and user-initiated downloads are exempt from the battery drain assessment.
- ▪The metric was developed in collaboration with Samsung and was introduced in beta in 2025 before rolling out in March 2026.
- ▪Apps displaying excessive battery drain may receive warning labels in the Play Store, potentially affecting user trust and downloads.
Android Police files mainly under tech. We currently carry 298 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Android Police |
| Canonical URL | https://www.androidpolice.com/play-store-battery-warnings/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:00:10 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T11:03:38.884Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T11:03:38.884Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hJJvFkAc8QEn |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{ "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": "1", "name": "Home", "item": "https://www.androidpolice.com/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"2", "name": "Utilities", "item": "https://www.androidpolice.com/utilities/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position":"3", "name": "Google has found a new way to shame battery-hogging apps before you even install them", "item": "https://www.androidpolice.com/play-store-battery-warnings/" } ] } Google has found a new way to shame battery-hogging apps before you even install them Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police By Ben Khalesi Published Apr 28, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT I’ve been covering Android since 2023, when I joined Android Police, mostly focusing on AI and everything around…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Android Police.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Android Police
