Samsung’s new ‘Battery Protection’ feature shows up early – here’s how it works [Gallery]

Ben Schoon | Dec 27 2023 - 9:45 am PT

As our smartphones are tasked with longer lifetimes, battery health is one of the things at the front of mind for many. Knowing that, Samsung is adding a new “Battery Protection” feature to its next big One UI update, but Galaxy users on Android 14 can check it out early.

We don’t know much about One UI 6.1 besides that Samsung will likely launch it on the Galaxy S24 series, but a recent leak did uncover a new “Battery Protection” section in the Settings menu.

Now, it’s been revealed that Samsung’s new “Battery Protection” feature already exists in One UI 6.0 based on Android 14. Available in the latest One UI 6.0 patches, the feature is hidden from view but available through apps that can manually launch app “activities.” There are multiple ways of doing this, such as with the simply named “Activity Launcher” app, but the activity you’ll need to turn on is listed as “BatteryProtectionActivity.”

Once launched, that activity reveals a new menu where you can toggle on the feature and see its three levels.

“Basic protection” limits your charger from forcing the device to stay at 100% charge, but ensures you’ll have at least 95%.

When your battery is charged to 100%, charging will stop until the battery level drops down to 95% and then charging will start again. This will repeat until your phone is disconnected from the charger. This provides a basic level of protection for your battery and ensures that your phone is charged to at least 95%.

“Adaptive protection” pauses fast charging at 80% and slowly charges to 100% by the time you wake up, all based on your typical phone usage habits. Google Pixel phones offer a similar feature, but based on an active alarm.

Charging will pause at 80% while you are sleeping and finish charging to 100% just before you wake up. This provides moderate protection for people who charge their phones over night. Sleep time is estimated based on your phone usage pattern.

“Maximum protection” simply limits charging to 80%.

Your battery will completely stop charging when it reaches 80% and will not resume unless the battery level drops below 80% This provides the most protection for your battery, but your tablet will be never charged higher than 80%.

The catch? It doesn’t work yet, apparently.

While the settings show up properly and you can switch between options, nothing actually works. At least that’s according to Tarun Vats, who first highlighted this method on Twitter/X earlier today. Rather, toggling on battery protection just limits your battery to a maximum of an 85% charge, an option that has been available for a while now, even being present in Samsung’s Android 13 update.

Notably, our testing on Galaxy S23 Ultra does not show the message that Vats saw, but that could be due to the device being at a lower capacity. That said, the device was still charging at full speed on all settings, so it’s hard to say anything for certain this early on. It does seem things are unfinished, though, based on some of the English translations being a little messy.

One UI 6.1 is expected to arrive with Battery Protection in tow as soon as January 2024.

Would you use these features?