Android

Android still doesn’t show battery health, but it could soon show storage health

Ben Schoon | Apr 19 2024 - 1:20 pm PT

Google is working on a new way to show the health of storage in your Android phone.

As our phones are being signed up for longer and longer lifespans, it’s more likely that components are going to start going bad well before the device is no longer safe to use. As such, it appears Google is working on building out better support for showing the status of components on your smartphone.

A battery health statistic isn’t one of those options yet. Many Android phones can show battery health such as those from Samsung, OnePlus, and others, but Android itself doesn’t support the functionality. Google is going to show battery cycle counts, but only on newer devices.

But, along with that effort, Android is also preparing to support showing the health of the storage chip in your device.

Android Authority highlights a commit to AOSP which sets up work for a new API in Android that would be able to show the health of a storage chip on an Android device. This would show, as a percentage, the health of the chip based on indicators from UFS chips. This isn’t a part of Android just yet, but the same work was noted in Android 15 Beta 1, suggesting Google is well on its way to making this functional.

Android already collects this data, Android Authority notes, so this API would simply surface it to apps (only system apps) such as the Settings menu.

Another page notes that Pixel already collects this data at 1% granularity, meaning that the percentage shown to the user would be accurate to within 1%. On some other devices, though, this is only measured by 10%, meaning, as an example, a device with 92% storage health would report back at 100%. This new API, apparently, would round up different, presumably showing 90% in our theoretical example.

It’s unclear when we’ll see this implemented, but Android 15 certainly seems likely. Google doesn’t require this for other Android OEMs, though, so we also don’t know if it’ll show up beyond Pixel.