The ability to monitor the battery health of your iPhone is a useful feature of iOS. It can tell you how hard you’ve used the phone and when it’s time to replace the battery. Having high battery health is an added plus that can help you earn more value when it comes time to sell your phone. The feature has been strangely absent from Android for many years, but that may change with Android 14.
Battery health check was initially found in Android 13 QPR betas. Google has added some APIs in Android 14 that can pass on crucial battery details such as manufacturing date, date of first use, charging policy, state of health, cycle count, and charging status, as discovered by Mishaal Rahman. These APIs can be accessed by apps that have the BATTERY_STATS permission, which can be granted to apps via ADB.
Checking Your Battery Health with Batt: A Step-by-Step Guide
If you’re using an Android 14 device and want to check your battery health, you can use the open-source app Batt. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Batt to monitor your battery health:
- Install the Batt app on your Android 14 device.
- Launch the app, and it will display the number of charging cycles your phone has gone through.
- If you want more detailed information, such as battery health as a percentage of original capacity, you’ll need to run an ADB command.
To grant Batt the necessary permissions to display more information, follow these steps:
- Install ADB on your computer if you haven’t already.
- Connect your Android 14 device to your computer via USB.
- Open a command prompt or terminal window and enter the following command:
pm grant com.porg.batt android.permission.BATTERY_STATS- Once you’ve granted the necessary permissions, Batt will display more detailed information about your phone’s battery health.
Because the functionality is still not ready for public distribution, it’s uncertain how accurate these statistics are. The values returned by the APIs are dependent on the tracking performed by your phone’s hardware and the fact that your phone can track this data in the first place. As a result, your mileage may vary depending on your hardware.
The existence of the APIs suggests that Google is working on the functionality and wants to release it at some point. We hope that the capability will be available on all Android devices in the near future.
