Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR
- New APIs are available in Android 14 that allows apps to display your phone’s battery health.
- You need to grant permission through ADB for the apps to display more information.
- The feature may be made more accessible in a future Android release.
One neat feature of iOS is the ability to check the battery health of your iPhone. It helps gauge how hard you have used the phone and when it is time for a battery swap. Having good battery health is a bonus and helps get you some more value when the time comes to sell your phone. The feature has been surprisingly missing from Android for all these years, but that might finally change with Android 14.
Battery health check as a feature was first spotted in Android 13‘s QPR betas. In Android 14, as spotted by Mishaal Rahman, Google has added some APIs that can pass on key battery details such as manufacturing date, date of first use, charging policy, state of health, cycle count, and charging status. These APIs can be called by apps with the requisite BATTERY_STATS permission, which can be granted to apps through ADB.
If you are using a phone running Android 14, you can check your battery health by installing this open-source app called Batt. It will show you the number of charging cycles you’ve undertaken on the phone. If you want more details, such as the battery health as a percentage of original capacity, run the following ADB command:
Code
pm grant com.porg.batt android.permission.BATTERY_STATSIt’s unclear how accurate these stats are since the feature is still not ready for public release. The values that the APIs return depend on the tracking done by your phone’s hardware and that your phone can track this data in the first place. So your mileage will vary depending on your hardware.
The existence of the APIs is a good indication that Google is working on the feature and intends to release it someday. We hope the feature makes it to all Android devices in the near future.
