Google Wants To Put An End To Battery-Hungry Android Apps

With each new Android release in recent years, Google has introduced several measures to enhance performance and minimize battery drain. Plus, phones now come with even bigger batteries, enabling them to last longer. But one lingering problem remains: apps suddenly draining excessive battery in the background. Google wants to fix this problem for good as well, which is why it is updating the Android Vitals dashboard with a new “excessive wake locks” metric.

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On the Android Developers Blog, Google announced it is starting a new “multi-year plan” to provide developers with more relevant tools and data to better understand their app’s resource consumption. As part of this, it is adding a new excessive wake locks metric to the Android Vitals dashboard in the Google Play console. Google says this metric will report “partial wake lock use as excessive when all of the partial wake locks, added together, run for more than 3 hours in a 24-hour period.”

At the moment, the Vitals dashboard only tracks how long an app holds a wakelock while running in the background without an active foreground service.

Google has also partnered with several Android device makers, including Samsung, to use their insight into finding causes behind apps suddenly holding excessive wakelocks and causing unwanted battery drain.

Apps suddenly draining excessive battery in the background for no clear reason remains one of Android’s biggest pain points. So, it’s good to see Google stepping up and providing developers with the necessary tools to put an end to this problem. Google will also “explore Play Store treatments to help users choose apps that meet their needs.”

App developers, check out Google’s new documentation and provide feedback

If you are an app developer, Google recommends you check out the new excessive wake lock metric documentation. The company is looking for your feedback on how you can use the metric to make your app better. The excessive wake lock metric will only move from beta to general availability after the company gathers sufficient feedback.

Google says it may introduce additional metrics in Android Vitals later this year to put the spotlight on other critical performance issues in your app.