Richard Goodwin 13/11/2017 - 10:50am

Google’s on-going mission to make battery life better inside Android will name and shame apps that kill battery life

Google’s Android Oreo 8.1 update will call out applications on your phone that are hogging battery life. Not only this, it will name and shame them, so you can switch them off or delete them entirely.

Google has always been pretty decent in its battery life reporting, which is accessed via settings, but this new initiative will place the battery reporting in a more prominent position, so you cannot miss it.

When an application starts hammering your battery for no reason it will be named and shamed inside the new banner layout, as you can see below:

This way, you will be able to kill it right away. And if it persists in its nefarious, battery-draining ways, you can simply opt to delete it from your phone.

I did this with the Facebook app months ago and my phone has been running a lot smoother since. I also don’t waste any time looking at stupid Facebook ads (which is basically all Facebook’s news stream is these days).

This new battery feature has shown up in the developer preview of Android Oreo 8.1. But because it is a developer preview build, there is, of course, a chance it won’t make it through to the final build. Why? God knows. But it has happened before.