by It can be hard to tell when a phone is on its deathbed or if an app is just an obvious battery hog. According to a recent Android developer blog, Google will help users get to the bottom of things.
The company just announced the launch of a new metric for app developers that keeps track of battery usage. If a developer consistently violates Google’s battery usage policy, an alert will be displayed on the Play Store to warn end users.
A Play Store warning.
This metric will place a particular eye on so-called wake locks, where smartphones are prevented from entering sleep mode by battery-hungry apps that want to run background processes when the screen is off. Google says that wakelocks are a “major contributor to battery drain” and has developed a threshold for what is considered acceptable for apps running in the background.
This threshold “considers a user session excessive if it contains more than two cumulative hours of non-exempt wakelocks in a 24-hour period.” Exceptions exist when the background process provides “clear user benefits,” citing examples of audio playback and user-initiated data transfers.
If a developer does not fix the underlying wake lock issue, they will see a visible warning. The Play Store label states: “This app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity.” This will likely deter potential downloaders. There is no way I would download any of these apps on my phone.
In some cases, Google goes one step further and excludes problematic apps from certain search areas in the Play Store. These rules come into effect on March 1st, so we only have a few months left to see how quickly an Android phone can go completely dead from a full battery.
