Android Developers Blog: Battery Technical Quality Enforcement is Here: How to Optimize Common Wake Lock Use Cases

Google Play Store began rolling out wake lock technical quality enforcement on March 1st, 2026, meaning apps that hold excessive partial wake locks may face store listing warnings and reduced discoverability. The post explains the bad behavior threshold (holding a non-exempted partial wake lock for 2+ hours in 5%+ of sessions over 28 days) and provides concrete optimization guidance for common scenarios: user-initiated data transfers (use UIDT API), periodic background syncs (use WorkManager), Bluetooth companion apps (use companion device pairing APIs), location-based apps (use FusedLocationProvider with batching), sensor monitoring (use maxReportLatencyUs for batching or Health Connect), and network socket apps (rely on hardware interrupts instead of manual wake locks). It also covers how to identify wake locks from third-party SDKs using Android vitals and system traces.