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Android 14 may bring an iPhone-like battery health feature to Android-powered smartphones and tablets. Google has developed new APIs that enable Android devices to report detailed battery stats, including cycle count, charging status, state of health (estimated percentage of the original capacity), manufacturing date, charging policy, and more. It’s unclear if the company plans to integrate the feature in the system settings app or leave it to OEMs or third-party developers to come up with their custom solutions.
Google has been working on a battery health feature for Android since last year
Android expert Mishaal Rahman first spotted an in-development battery health feature in an Android 13 QPR (Quarterly Platform Release) beta build last October. While the feature was missing from the first Android 14 beta build, Google added new system APIs to Beta 2 that serve a similar purpose. Digging deeper into the new release, Rahman found that these APIs can be used by any third-party app to pull up battery stats.
Using this information, an Android developer with the Twitter handle @narektor created a simplistic proof-of-concept app to check the functionality of the new APIs. The open-source app aptly named Batt is available to download from GitLab. It works on Android 14-powered devices and can show a detailed battery report. You can see a few screenshots shared by users who tested this app in the Twitter thread below.
As pointed out by Rahman, there’s no way to verify the accuracy of the data reported by the app. All it does is give you information returned by the APIs in an easily apprehensible way. The APIs also rely on the stats tracked by the charging IC and HAL’s (Hardware Abstraction Layer) support for the feature. Moreover, some of the data, such as the manufacture date and the date of first use, appear to be default data provided by Google with no actual tracking happening.
A few folks have asked me if Pixels will still get that “battery health” feature I spotted in the Android 13 QPR betas.
While the feature was removed from the SettingsIntelligence app in Android 14 Beta 1, there’s a chance it could be brought back.https://t.co/KATqE14NQH
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) May 30, 2023
It’s unclear if Google will bake this feature into the OS
This is the closest we have ever been to a battery health feature on Android. Now that Google has developed APIs that can report battery stats, we hope the company would go the distance and bake the feature into Android’s Settings app. That would be more convenient than a separate app for the same purpose. OEMs can build custom power management features and charging recommendations around it. We will let you know when we have more information. The stable Android 14 release is still a few months away.
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