According to Android Authority, several indications suggest that Google is preparing to introduce a new battery saving feature on its smartphone, like the one Apple already offers on its iPhones.
The Google Pixel 8 // Source: Chloé Pertuis for Frandroid
It is an unchanging chemical principle for lithium batteries. With use and successive charging cycles, they become damaged over time and gradually lose their capacity. It is generally assumed that a battery has lost 20% of its original capacity after 800 charge cycles, or just over two years of use.
Unfortunately, Android smartphones do not take this natural battery wear into account in the operating system. However, Apple points this out with its iPhones. With the release of the iPhone 15 this year, the manufacturer introduced a new menu in iOS that shows the status of the battery. This menu displays the percentage of capacity remaining, offers improved battery performance and optimization of charging to limit it to a maximum of 80% for less damage to the lithium cells.
Until now, Apple was one of the few manufacturers to offer such a function in its operating system. However, it seems that Google is working on developing a similar feature for Android smartphones.
New ways to care for your battery
As the American site Android Authority reports, the latest “Pixel Feature Drop” update for Google smartphones has added a new option called “Battery Information” to the “About Phone” menu. This option is currently relatively limited and allows you to see the date of manufacture of the battery and the number of charging cycles it has undergone. In addition, the specialist site points out that Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 now offers another menu on the topic of “battery status”. At the moment, this menu is only intended to provide general information, but elements of the application code suggest that much more information could soon be displayed on this screen:
This page gives you the “estimated percentage of charge the battery can maintain compared to when it was new” before and after “recalibrating” the battery. We don't have details about what this “recalibration” means, but since some of the code suggests that “the process may take a few weeks,” we assume it will require collection of system data over a long period of time, to provide more reliable battery capacity estimation.
It remains to be seen whether Google will retain these features when they launch on its own Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones, or whether the company will integrate them directly into AOSP, the open source Android base, for other manufacturers to use . again on their own smartphones. Currently, Google has not yet officially communicated these options related to the health of the battery.