A very useful new feature is coming to Android 15 to provide valuable insight into the overall health and longevity of your storage chip.
At present, users are relatively in the dark when it comes to managing critical aspects of an Android phone. While manufacturers will likely provide a guarantee of support for the software on your device, the same can’t be said of the hardware. That should begin to change with the rollout of the Android 15 update.
As detailed by Android Authority, Google has been working on providing key information on the important components that make up your phone. Battery health has been available in the past with the inclusion of the manufacturer’s date, cycle count, and health status. This has been helpful for anticipating battery replacements, but details have been removed as part of the Android 14 QPR2 update.
This feature has been tipped for a return but only for users of the soon-to-be-released Google Pixel 8a and its successors.
Android 15 will reportedly include info on the health of the phone’s built-in storage. This will appear in a new “Device Diagnostics” app. It will use new API to indicate “the remaining lifetime” of the storage. A 90% reading would indicate that your phone has ample life left, for instance.
The API is already present in Android 15 beta 1, with more details expected to follow. The code has not yet been made available to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) as the update provided by Google was already merged into the tech giant’s internal Android codebase.
This is the repository Google uses to construct its Android builds, with the API sending out the information to Android’s system apps.