How to check battery health on your Android phone

You might notice that your phone’s battery isn’t as robust as it was when you purchased it. Frequently seeing the low battery indicator can get annoying, especially if you feel like you fully charged your phone a few hours ago. Whether you use a high-end or budget phone, the battery degrades over time.



You can check the battery’s health by reviewing its details in the settings app or installing third-party apps that offer detailed reports. This guide will walk you through several methods to check your Android phone or tablet’s battery health.


Why you should monitor your Android phone’s battery health

Two phones with battery and lightning bolt symbol on a blue green background.

Source: Pixabay

Battery health is an important indicator. It tells you the rate at which a battery is degrading. It provides information about the battery capacity, temperature, and charging cycles. Most Android phones show basic stats like battery usage by various apps and battery drain details. If you have a Samsung phone, you can get more information about the battery with the Samsung Members app. Use a third-party app like AccuBattery, Battery Guru, or CPU-Z for other phones.

Check battery usage from the Settings app

You can view your phone’s battery usage from the settings app. Most phones show which apps consume the most power, while some also display your battery’s temperature.

  1. Open the Settings app on your phone.
  2. Select Battery. Or, search for battery from the search bar.
  3. Select Battery usage.
  4. This displays the battery usage since the last full charge. It also shows which apps have been draining your phone’s battery.
  5. To view more details, tap the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner.
  6. Select Show full device usage.
  7. Select any app from the menu. You’ll see options like Unrestricted, Optimized, and Restricted to manage battery usage.

Check your battery health from the Phone

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The best Android apps to check Android battery health

AccuBattery Battery Health App

Robert Triggs / Android Authority

Batteries don’t last forever; that’s just an unfortunate fact of smartphone life. As controversial as the iPhone 14’s seemingly limited long-term battery health may be, at least Apple provides an easy method to track how your power cell is holding up. It’s as simple as checking your regular battery settings. So while your iPhone may eventually only last a few hours on a single charge, at least you’ll be well prepared to book that battery replacement.

Android, by comparison, is a black box. Everything ticks along fine until your phone starts restarting, and hopefully, you piece together that the battery is kaput before sending the phone away for diagnostics. A simple battery replacement isn’t all that expensive, especially compared to a new phone. But many will end up discarding an otherwise perfectly working handset because it’s not clear what the cause of the problem really is or they need an immediate fix.

A heads-up would be nice, to say the least. Especially as many phones in the flagship and mid-tiers receive long-term updates that, in theory, will keep them ticking along for four or five years. Increasingly, the battery is the weakest link when running your phone for many years and consumers now need a way to keep on top of this potentially key repair.

Battery health monitoring is essential for phones built to last four or five years.

We reached out to Google to ask why no such feature is built into Android and whether there are plans to adopt an iPhone-esque percentage of initial capacity metric. Unfortunately, we received no response. As it stands, Android simply doesn’t include specific tools for tracking battery health baked into the operating system, leaving users at the whims of third-party applications.

All hope is not lost, though.

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Think your Pixel is hacked? Google now gives you a new way to check.

google pixel 7 pro home screen standing

Ryan Haines / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • Google has announced a Pixel Binary Transparency feature.
  • This will let users manually verify their Pixel firmware to ensure it isn’t hacked.
  • The feature joins Android Verified Boot in fighting against supply chain attacks.

Google already offers an under-the-hood Android Verified Boot feature to check that your firmware comes from a trusted source. Now, the company has announced a way for users themselves to check that they’re running a trusted version of Android on their Pixels.

Google says the so-called Pixel Binary Transparency feature is a response to software supply chain attacks. These attacks see software being compromised before the device gets to users.

Pixel Binary Transparency sees Google generating a public cryptographic log of metadata for factory firmware images. From here, Pixel owners can use this log to “mathematically prove” that their firmware is indeed the real deal supplied by Google and not hacked.

“There’s no way to change the information in the log to match the tampered version of the software without detection,” the Pixel maker adds.

Has your smartphone ever been hacked?

337 votes

The company reiterates that most users won’t need to use the Pixel Binary Transparency feature as Android Verified Boot ensures the authenticity of the firmware, to begin with. You can nevertheless check out this page for instructions to try the new feature, which requires connecting to the device via ADB.

It stands to reason that this feature won’t come to top smartphones from other brands just yet given the Pixel-focused nature of it. But we wouldn’t mind seeing other manufacturers offering their own take on this capability.

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Delete these apps NOW: Android users are urged to check their phones

Android users have been urged to delete ‘malicious’ apps from their phones that have been secretly signing them up for paid subscriptions.

Security firm Kaspersky found 11 apps on the Google Play Store with snazzy designs and logos that are actually a devious new type of malware, called Fleckpe. 

The apps, which are mostly related to photo and video editing, have names including Photo Effect Editor and Beauty Slimming Photo Editor. 

While they’ve now been removed from Google Play, they have already been installed on more than 620,000 devices worldwide and been used to take users’ money without permission.

Although Apple devices are unaffected because they use a different app store, the tech giant recently had to issue a security update of its own. 

The apps, which are mostly related to photo and video editing, have names including Photo Effect Editor and Beauty Slimming Photo Editor

The apps, which are mostly related to photo and video editing, have names including Photo Effect Editor and Beauty Slimming Photo Editor

According to Kaspersky, this particular new type of malware is being distributed as a Trojan – a type of seemingly innocuous software that later reveals its malicious intent. 

DELETE these Android apps from your device 

– com.impressionism.prozs.app

– com.picture.pictureframe

– com.beauty.slimming.pro

– com.beauty.camera.plus.photoeditor

– com.microclip.vodeoeditor

– com.gif.camera.editor

– com.apps.camera.photos

– com.toolbox.photoeditor 

– com.hd.h4ks.wallpaper

– com.draw.graffiti

– com.urox.opixe.nightcamreapro 

It has provided a list of the 11 apps’ package names – the code that uniquely identifies each one on devices and the Google Play store. 

Anyone with the 11 apps installed on their phone or tablet should delete them without delay, because they sign users up to a paid subscription option without their knowledge. 

‘Every once in a while, someone will come across malicious apps on Google Play that seem harmless at first,’ said Dmitry Kalinin, developer at Kaspersky, in a report

‘Some of the trickiest of these are subscription Trojans, which often go unnoticed

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Google warns millions of users to check important iPhone and Android app setting now

DID you realise that your photos capture the location of where they were taken?

Whether it’s on iPhone or Android, it happens on all smartphones.

Look out for this prompt in the Google Photos app

1

Look out for this prompt in the Google Photos app

It’s a useful way to know when a special memory took place.

The feature is pretty safe.

But not everyone is comfortable with the idea of locations being logged.

Particularly for photos taken at home or work.

If you use Google Photos to store your images, the tech giant is now alerting you about something related, called estimated photo locations.

This uses things like visible landmarks to work out where the photo was taken.

As the alert explains, photo locations come from multiple locations, including locations estimated by Google Photos.

Google stopped using Location History to estimate photo locations but they are continuing to guess using other sources instead when ‘estimate missing locations’ is switched on.

When you open the Google Photos app, you’ll be asked whether you want to keep any existing estimated locations, or whether you want to remove them.

If you do decide to delete them, you’ll be warned before: “Deleting estimated photo locations based on Location History may result in permanent loss of those estimated locations.

“Your photos will be kept.”

It’s up to you to decide what you’re comfortable with.

Either way, get thinking before May comes.

If you don’t choose to keep your estimated locations before May 1st, 2023, Google will automatically remove the estimations.

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