Boost app performance and battery life: New Android Vitals Metrics are here

Posted by Karan Jhavar - Product Manager, Android Frameworks, and Dan Brown - Product Manager, Google Play

Android has long championed performance, continuously evolving to deliver exceptional user experiences. Building upon years of refinement, we're now focusing on pinpointing resource-intensive use cases and developing platform-level solutions that benefit all users, across the vast Android ecosystem.

Since the launch of Android vitals in Play Console in 2017, Play has been investing in providing fleet-wide visibility into performance issues, making it easier to identify and fix problems as they occur. Today, Android and Google Play are taking a significant step forward in partnership with top OEMs, like Samsung, leveraging their real-world insights into excessive resource consumption. Our shared goal is to make Android development more streamlined and consistent by providing a standardized definition of what good and great looks like when it comes to technical quality.

"Samsung is excited to collaborate with Android and Google Play on these new performance metrics. By sharing our user experience insights, we aim to help developers build truly optimized apps that deliver exceptional performance and battery life across the ecosystem. We believe this collaboration will lead to a more consistent and positive experience for all Android users."

– Samsung

We're embarking on a multi-year plan to empower you with the tools and data you need to understand, diagnose, and improve your app's resource consumption, resulting in happier and more engaged users, both for your app, and Android as a whole.

Today, we're launching the first of these new metrics in beta: excessive wake locks. This metric directly addresses one of the most significant frustrations for Android users – excessive battery drain. By optimizing your app's wake lock behavior, you can significantly enhance battery life and user satisfaction.

The Android vitals beta metric reports partial wake lock use as excessive when all of the partial wake locks, added together, run for more than 3 hours in a 24-hour period. The current iteration of excessive wake lock metrics tracks time only if the wake lock is held when the app is in the background and does not have a foreground service.

These new metrics will provide comprehensive, fleet-wide visibility into performance and battery life, equipping developers with the data needed to diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks. We have also revamped our wake lock documentation which shares effective wake lock implementation strategies and best practices.

In addition, we are also launching the excessive wake lock metric documentation to provide clear guidance on interpreting the metrics. We highly encourage developers to check out this page and provide feedback with their use case on this new metric. Your input is invaluable in refining these metrics before their general availability. In this beta phase, we're actively seeking feedback on the metric definition and how it aligns with your app's use cases. Once we reach general availability, we will explore Play Store treatments to help users choose apps that meet their needs.

Later this year, we may introduce additional metrics in Android vitals highlighting additional critical performance issues.

Thank you for your ongoing commitment to delivering delightful, fast, and high-performance experiences to users across the entire Android ecosystem.