With phone manufacturers attempting to support their new phones for up to 7 years, folks who decide to keep them for longer periods of time need to consider what happens to a phone over that time. We know that batteries can degrade and their charges last less and less and can only be fully charged for so many cycles. What about storage, though?
In Android 15, we could see a new screen that shows the health of your phone’s storage. There’s a new storage health API that should reveal to you a percentage to explain how much life your phone has left.
Spotted by Mishaal Rahman, Google is likely to publish a patch to AOSP that’ll bring this new API forward and start to showcase storage health of Android phones. This is actually a part of a new Device Diagnostics app that could give you more than just your phone’s storage health. It could also be used as a way to share battery health, like we first saw in an earlier Android 14 QPR beta build.
This new API is apparently already included in the first Android 15 Beta 1, although you more than likely can’t see information from it. We’ll need Google to give us this new Device Diagnostics app first. Once you can, your phone’s storage will show, for example, that it has 90% lifetime remaining or a lower percentage as the phone ages.
To recap, with Android 15 launching this year, we’ll soon know more about the number of battery cycles our phone has been through and also the health of its storage. That’s important, because again, companies like Google are supporting phones for longer and longer periods of time.