Android 14’s New Feature Lets You Check Your Battery Health

The ability to monitor your iPhone’s battery status is a cool feature available on iOS devices. It’s a handy tool for determining when the phone’s battery needs to be replaced based on how frequently you’ve used it. Having a healthy battery will increase the worth of your phone when the time comes to sell it. This functionality has been prominently missing from Android for quite some time, but Android 14 might eventually rectify this.

Mishaal Rahman, an Android expert, has discovered that in Android 14, Google has expanded the functionality of the BatteryManager APIs.

With these updates, devices can now disclose additional data about their batteries, such as the total number of charge cycles, the charging policy, the charging status, the date of first use, the date of manufacturing, and the battery’s current health.

However, at the moment, these new APIs are only accessible on Pixel devices running Android 14 Beta 2. Apps can use these APIs if they have been granted the BATTERY_STATS permission, which can be done via the Android Debug Bridge.

The accuracy of the information provided by the new BatteryHealth APIs, however, is dependent on the charging IC (integrated chip) and HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) of the mobile device. A charging IC is an integrated circuit that manages the charging process for a device’s battery. As qouted by Mishaal:

Fair warning, though: I don’t know how accurate the stats will be. The app just reports what the APIs return, which in turn depends on whether the stats are actually tracked by the charging IC and whether the HAL supports this feature.

These new BatteryHealth APIs might be used by Samsung’s One UI 6.0, which is based on Android 14, to accurately reveal additional information about the battery health of Galaxy smartphones and tablets.

If you’re using an Android 14 device, you may download a free software called Batt that will analyze your battery life and report any problems it finds. You can see how many times you’ve recharged your phone.