Android 13 will alert you on high app background battery usage

Google just recently released the second developer preview build of the upcoming Android OS and also announced that Android 13 will bring a feature that will help save some battery life. The company has revealed in a blog post that Android 13 will have an alert system that will let people know if an app is draining excessive background battery.

”Android 13 introduces a system notification that appears when your app consumes a large amount of device battery during a 24-hour period. This new notification appears for all apps on devices that run on Android 13, regardless of target SDK version,” the company said.

To assess how an app might be draining your phone’s battery, Google says the system takes into account the work that an app does in several different places. These include foreground services, app’s cache, background services, work tasks, broadcast receivers, and more. Foreground services are basically when an app performs a function that remains visible to users in the notification section too, and one can’t dismiss it until the app is closed from the foreground. One example of this is the music player app. Until and unless you close the app, it will remain visible in the notification panel and you don’t get the option to remove it.

While all this might sound a bit technical to you, a simple explanation for this is that Android 13 will start assessing apps more aggressively to offer better battery life and transparency to users in terms of battery usage. The upcoming feature is important as people will also get to know if an unused app is draining the battery by remaining active in the background.

However, Google also mentioned that some of the apps will remain exempted from battery-preserving measures and these include system apps, companion apps, apps running on a device in demo mode, VPN apps, persistent apps, profile owner apps, and device owner apps. In addition to this, if a user has given an”unrestricted” tag to any app, then the system won’t alert you if that app drains excessive battery.

Google hasn’t yet announced when it plans to release the stable version of Android 13 for everyone. It is expected to start rolling out the first beta version of the upcoming Android OS in April this year, and a stable update in September or October after releasing a few beta updates.