One of the most interesting Apple additions to iOS was the Battery Health feature. The feature was added way back with iOS 11.3 and tells the user if his battery needs a replacement. Unfortunately, this feature has been absent on Android 14. However, according to a reputed source, the feature could be finally coming with Android 14.
Android 14 – Is There a New Battery Health Feature?
As per the former XDA-Developers’ Editor-in-Chief Mishaal Rahman, Google added some new BatteryManager APIs to Android 14 beta. Two of these APIs are public and used to provide info about cycle counts and charging status. While the rest are system APIs that report the device’s manufacturing date, date of first use, charging policy, and state of health. According to Rahman, any app with BATTERY_STATS permission can call these system APIs. Right now, these APIs are available only on Pixel devices running Android 14 Beta 2 or higher.
I bought a used Pixel 7 Pro recently and thought it was a shame that Google's battery health feature hasn't been released.
It'd be nice to see how many charge cycles it's had or the estimated % of its original capacity. Fortunately, Google's made it possible in Android 14! 🧵 pic.twitter.com/KXGtLwhJtU
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) June 1, 2023
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The Batt App
In light of such discovery, the developer Narekd brought an app called Batt. It makes use of the new APIs to report the smartphone’s battery health and charging cycles. The app is available from GitLab and it’s up for testing on phones with the latest Android 14 beta.
It is worth noting that the app may not be totally accurate at this point. The app simply shares what the APIs return and those stats depend on the information the charging IC tracks. It also depends on whether or not the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) offers support for this feature.
For now, there is no word on whether this feature will be natively present with Android 14 or not. We can only hope for the best. Google has been constantly improving Android and making it a more interesting option over iOS. We hope these new APIs don’t arrive as a simple coincidence. Hopefully, there will be an actual use for them on the final version of Android 14.
There are more interesting features making way for Android 14. Apparently, the OS will also allow the user to take use the phone as a webcam. It will also improve the Screen Recording Feature. Of Course, we will need to wait and see if all these features will be present in the final version of the OS.
