Understanding has the Pulse app appeared on your Android? Here’s what it is

Over the past few days, some Android users have discovered a new app on their devices that was installed without their knowledge. It’s listed on the Google Play Store as Android Pulse. It has already been downloaded over 10 million times, even though almost nobody has heard of it.

As the website 9to5Google has discovered, Pulse is a new system app from Google. It’s automatically installed and appears to be intended not only for Android 17 but also for older versions of Android too. But what exactly does it do?

What is Android Pulse?

Android Pulse is an app that runs continuously in the background and monitors other apps. It’s designed to ensure that other applications don’t consume excessive resources, such as battery life or RAM.

Google describes this as “critical consumption of system resources” and aims to prevent certain apps from reducing the performance of the entire device by using an excessive amount of power or RAM. To this end, the company has also introduced fixed RAM limits for Android apps, as we recently reported.

At that stage, however, it wasn’t yet clear that Google had developed its own system app for this purpose. This app appears to have far-reaching permissions, given that it’s capable of monitoring all other installed apps.

Android users with Pulse automatically installed on their smartphones weren’t provided with any information about how the app works, a fact reflected in some negative reviews. Furthermore, it’s not possible to actively access Pulse to get an overview of all apps’ resource usage or to see whether the app has detected any suspicious activity.

The latter would actually be useful, as increased RAM or battery usage can indicate that an app is poorly optimised or contains malicious files.

Is Android Pulse dangerous?

Essentially, what Android Pulse does is useful and beneficial. After all, it ultimately ensures that Android can run more securely and stably. However, as there was no way to opt out of the download, scant information about the app from Google, and because the app has extensive permissions, it has created distrust among users.

To check whether Android Pulse is already on your device, you can tap on your account (or your profile picture) in the Google Play Store and then go to Manage apps & device – Manage – Available updates. If Android Pulse appears amongst the apps with pending updates, it has already been installed on the device.

This is by no means the first time that Google has installed apps on the devices of all Android users without asking. About a year ago, news broke about SafetyCore, a system app that could scan Google Messages for nude images and videos. It was also activated on devices without users’ consent.

In this case, Android Pulse isn’t really ‘spying’ on your device for sensitive data. However, the app can collect extensive data on battery consumption and RAM usage across all applications and send it to Google, which is not insignificant, even if this data is not shared with third parties.

Find out all about Google’s next Pixel drop, in our dedicated article.