Google begins to penalize applications that consume excessive battery in the background in the Play Store

Google has started to penalize in the Play Store to those applications that consume excessive battery in the background adding warnings or reducing their visibility in the store, as well as recommendations.

The company announced last November that would take action against applications that drain the smartphone’s battery‘ with the aim of reducing these anomalous behaviors in favor of ‘apps’ that do work for efficient energy consumption.

Google gave developers until March to correct the excessive consumption, and at the end of the deadline, it is already working on limiting applications that use too much battery when they are not actively running.

To do this, you will add warnings with the message: “This app uses more battery than expected due to increased background activity.” Also will decrease the apparitions in the Play Store or in the recommendations section.

“Recognizing that excessive battery consumption is a top concern for Android users, Google has taken important steps to help developers create more energy-efficient applications,” the company explained on the Android developer blog.

These measures are included in the company’s objective to reduce the number of applications that exceed the “excessive activation lock” threshold in the Android Vitals metric, which began testing early last year.

The metric is based on a new threshold of abnormal behaviorwhich determines when an application excessively uses the activation function, which allows the app to continue performing some activity in the background when the user has turned off the smartphone screen.

This is a useful function, for example, to listen to music or download files while not using the phone. However, this use keeps the phone active and has a energy costwhich sometimes results in high consumption without the user realizing it.