Android 15 could add an iPhone-level battery health menu

Summary

• Android 14 introduced new APIs for tracking battery health, and Android 15 may further enhance this feature.
• The latest beta build of Android 14 includes battery options and a hidden battery health page.
• Google is also working on features such as reading battery serial numbers to differentiate between legitimate and third-party batteries.

Nothing is more frustrating than waking up after a long night’s rest, getting ready to go into the office, and grabbing your phone only to see that it hasn’t charged at all. It’s equally annoying when you do charge your phone fully, only to find that it’s already in battery-saving mode by lunchtime. No phone would exist without its battery, but often, batteries are the first part of your phone to degrade and need replacement. Android 14, made it possible to see some aspects of your phone’s battery health with new APIs that previous versions did not have. Recent beta builds of the OS showcase the fruits of that API’s labor, indicating that more advanced and accurate tracking may come shipped with Android 15.

The latest experimental Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 build was released earlier in December, and with it came a multitude of tweaks, enhancements, and new features. Mishaal Rahman noticed that battery options had been changed the day the build was released, with a new “allow background usage” toggle replacing the “Restricted” battery optimization. Just recently, Nail Sadykov of the Google News channel on Telegram discovered some additional resources through the beta build to tell just how much life you still have remaining on your Android phone’s battery.

Rahman wrote a piece for Android Authority that followed up on Sadykov’s findings. While there is an easily accessible battery information page that dropped in Google’s December 2023 Pixel Feature Drop and shows simple information such as the manufacture date and cycle count of your phone’s battery, a currently hidden menu showcases the framework of what’s to come. This all sounds very similar to Apple’s Battery Health & Charging page in iOS. That page currently shows your iPhone’s maximum battery capacity and lets you toggle Optimized Battery Charging and Clean Energy Charging on and off.

In the latest Settings Services app on Pixel phones, there’s a new battery health page that needs to be manually activated to get it to show. The new page showcases nodes and options such as stats about your battery usage and health, whether Battery Saver, Adaptive Charging, and Battery Share are turned on, and much more. Notably, there’s no information currently being shown on the battery health page except a note that says, “Batteries degrade over time and last fewer hours between charges.” Additionally, Rahman found that Google will soon be able to read and translate what the battery’s serial numbers are on Android phones. This will help Android users tell whether their phone’s battery is legitimate or third-party.

While it’s quite difficult for third-party apps at this time to accurately read battery life information, there are some that try to approximate numbers. We’ve compiled some of the best apps that we’ve used to track our battery health information for years, and hopefully, they’ll take advantage of the new Android API as well that was introduced with the latest Android OS. Android 14 is a genuinely solid option, no matter what capacity charge your battery holds. There are a ton of power-saving optimizations that improve how long devices running it can hold a charge. We presume that Google will take what it’s learned from Android 14’s optimizations and improve on them even more in 2024.