Google is cracking down on Android apps that "steal battery"

Google is finally getting serious about apps that secretly drain your phone’s battery. According to Android Authority, the company has rolled out new rules designed to stop apps from keeping your device awake when it doesn’t need to be.

The goal is to give your phone more time between charges and stop wasteful background activity that most users never even notice.

The main focus of these new rules is something called a wake lock. It’s a tool that lets an app keep the processor running even when your screen is off.

For apps that play music or download files, this makes perfect sense. But too many apps abuse the feature, holding onto it for hours for no good reason. When that happens, your phone can’t go into deep sleep, and the battery ends up paying the price.

Starting March 1, 2026, Google will start tracking how long apps keep your phone awake. If an app does it for more than two hours in a single day without a valid reason, it’ll be marked as a battery hog.

The same goes for wearables like smartwatches. If an app uses more than 4.44% of the device’s battery per hour during an active session, it will be flagged too. The idea is to stop small devices with limited battery life from being drained by sloppy or greedy software.

Google isn’t just quietly tracking these issues; they are also making them public. If an app breaks the rules, Google isn’t going to let it slide.

Those apps will get a warning right on their Play Store page, telling people straight up that “this app may drain your battery faster.” Google will also push them lower in search results and recommendations, so they’re less likely to pop up when you’re browsing for new apps.

It’s a small change, but one that really shows Google has been paying attention to what Android users have been complaining about for years: batteries that die way too soon.

By making developers take better care of how their apps run in the background, Google wants phones to last longer, feel smoother, and just work better overall.