Android 14 might bring in detailed battery health stats similar to iOS

Android 14 is announcing one feature after another that could be brought to your devices. With the latest news, Android 14 might bring detailed battery statistics like iOS to your Android devices. New APIs are being developed by Google that will provide detailed statistics on battery usage, including cycle count, charging status, health state, manufacturing date, charging policy, and much more. But we are still not sure if the company is going to make this feature a part of the system or if it might be implementing it through OEMs or third-party developers to provide custom solutions for this feature.

Google has been working on a battery health feature for Android since last year

The in-progress battery health feature was first identified by Android specialist Mishaal Rahman in an Android 13 QPR (Quarterly Platform Release) beta release in October. Although the feature was absent from the initial beta edition of Android 14, Google added new system APIs to Beta 2 that fulfil a similar function. Rahman conducted further research on the latest release and discovered that any third-party software can access these APIs to retrieve battery statistics.

With this knowledge, an Android developer going by the Twitter handle @narektor developed a basic proof-of-concept app to test the new APIs’ capabilities. Download the open-source program suitably named Batt from GitLab. It functions with Android 14 and can display a thorough battery report. In the Twitter thread below, folks who tested this software have posted a few screenshots.

Rahman correctly noted that there is no way to confirm the veracity of the data supplied by the app. It only provides you with information returned by the APIs in an understandable manner. The APIs also rely on HAL’s (Hardware Abstraction Layer) support for the feature and the stats gathered by the charging IC. In addition, some of the information—such as the date of manufacture and the date of first use—seems to be standard information from Google without any actual tracking taking place.

We don’t know yet if this feature will be built into the system

This is the closest I’ve tried to get to this kind of feature on Android. Several APIs are being developed that will display battery stats, and we further hope that they will make the feature a part of the system. Making it a part of the settings will make it easier than installing a separate app for this purpose. We can wait for further information until the release of Android 14, which is a few months away.