Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR

Google has introduced a new metric in the Play Console beta to detect excessive background wake locks.
The tool helps developers identify and fix app behaviors that drain batteries without the user’s knowledge.
It’s part of Google’s longer-term plan to improve Android app performance consistency across devices.

If your phone‘s battery has ever mysteriously plummeted overnight or died halfway through the day for no apparent reason, the culprit might be a misbehaving app in the background. Now, Google says it’s rolling out new tools that could help fix that problem, starting with a metric aimed at spotting one of the most common sources of battery drain.

As part of a new beta release, Android developers will now be able to track “excessive wake locks” using the Android Vitals dashboard in the Play Console. Wake locks are system-level functions that keep your phone awake even when it’s supposed to be idle. Some apps use them for legitimate reasons, like playing music or tracking location, but when used incorrectly, especially in the background, they can seriously hurt battery life.

The new metric flags apps that hold wake locks for over three hours in a 24-hour window, but only when the app is running in the background without an active foreground service. According to Google, this is one of the biggest battery complaints among Android users, and the new tool gives developers a clearer way to catch and fix the problem before it affects too many people.

Google is working closely with major phone makers like Samsung to establish a more consistent definition of what “good” performance actually looks like on Android devices. The goal is to help developers write more efficient apps that behave well across different phones and brands, not just on a handful of test devices.

This is just the first step in what Google describes as a multi-year plan to give developers more insight into how their apps perform in the real world. Down the line, the company plans to roll out additional metrics focused on performance and battery life, and may even explore changes to the Play Store that would eventually use these metrics to highlight well-optimized apps for users.

For now, the excessive wake lock metric is still in beta, and Google is actively encouraging developers to try it out and provide feedback.

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