Last November, Google announced a new “bad behaviour threshold” to app developers. Apps that excessively drained users’ battery life could be excluded from recommended results or flagged with a warning.
As of the start of this month, that feature has gone live. Google has started letting its Play Store alert users to apps that can consume an unusually high amount of battery power due to high background activity, reports 9to5Google. The aim is to make it easier for people to identify apps that are likely to affect battery life before they’re downloaded and start wreaking havoc.
This came about after Google and Samsung co-developed a new beta metric for apps, called “excessive partial wake locks”, which measured how often they wake the device from sleep mode to run background processes.
Some apps are exempt from the warning if the high energy consumption is considered to have a clear function for the user. For example, music playback, location services or user-initiated data transfers.
Google plans to roll out the system gradually over the coming weeks.
To find out what else is coming up for Pixel users, check out our look at the March Pixel drop.