An app called Android Pulse surfaced in Play Store update queues at the weekend, though Google has been distributing it since March and it now sits on more than 10 million devices. It is a diagnostic tool with no user interface that flags software consuming unusual system resources.
Millions of Android owners spent the weekend trying to work out what had appeared on their phones. An app called Android Pulse showed up in Play Store update queues with a blank square where its icon should be, and no explanation attached.
Google’s own description is not written for the people who found it. The listing says the app “facilitates rule distribution for anomaly detection in critical system resource consumption by the Android operating system and installed applications.”
In practice it is a watchdog. It looks for software misbehaving on battery, processor or memory, and it has no user interface at all.
The distribution is the part worth pausing on. APKMirror records show it first appeared in March, seven builds shipped before the Play Store ever surfaced it, and the listing already counts more than 10 million downloads.
