Battery health is a big deal—perhaps now more than ever, with the whole iPhone slowdown debacle. While that in itself doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on Android phones, keeping your device’s battery health in mind is never a bad idea.
The thing is, there isn’t an easy or built-in way to check your battery health on Android. It’s a clear omission on Google’s part, but fortunately one that you can fill with a third-party app. And while there are a several options to do this, we recently found an app called AccuBattery that does the job better than anything else we’ve tried.
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Before we get into using the app, however, let’s make one thing clear: you’ll have to play the long game on this one. Since Android doesn’t natively feature a way to monitor battery health, any app used for this purpose will have to keep an eye on your battery over days, weeks, and months before it can determine its health. While AccuBattery starts to get an idea of your device’s battery health within a couple of charge cycles, the more you use it, the more accurate it will get.
First things first: go ahead and give AccuBattery an install.
As soon as you fire it up, you’ll go through a quick walk through of what it does and how it works. It’s worth pointing out that this app does quite a bit more than just gauge your battery health, though that’s what we’re focusing on here.
During said walkthrough, you’ll come across a page that talks about battery health—it’s important to pay attention here, because it’s sort of the backbone of what we’re talking about today.
The following page also lets you set a slider that notifies you when your battery hits that percentage. The default setting is 80 percent, which is sort of universally accepted as the best place to keep your battery charged for health and longevity. But you can make the call that works best for you here; for example, I left mine at 100 percent because I use Android Auto and got tired of it alarming constantly when I couldn’t unplug it without killing my Auto connection.
Finally, AccuBattery runs through a very quick calibration and detects your device’s stock battery capacity.
And with that, you’re in!
Note: There are free and Pro ($3.99) versions of AccuBattery available, but you won’t need the Premium version to monitor your battery’s health. If you enjoy this feature, however, I do encourage you to buy the Premium version and support the development of this excellent app. The Premium version removes ads and also lets you open an overlay for checking battery and CPU stats on top of other apps.
From here, just use your device as normal. Charge when you normally would, and use when you normally would. Just, you know, do what you always do. As time goes on, AccuBattery tracks your charge and discharge cycles, and then uses this information to monitor your battery health.
To take a look at this information, tap the “Health” option down at the bottom. Initially, it just shows blanks here. That’s because it doesn’t have any information to go off of yet. Since Android doesn’t provide historical battery information to apps, the basically has to start from scratch.
But there’s more here, too. Over time, AccuBattery tracks your battery wear and overall capacity. Again, these numbers populate over time, and the more you use your phone, the better it gets.
There’s also a small note that tells you what Battery Capacity is, but you can dismiss this if you want.
As you charge and discharge your phone, keep checking this screen to learn more about your phone’s battery health. After a few weeks on a Pixel 2 XL, here’s what it looks like:
After the first two or three charges, it showed the health at around 95 percent, but as time has gone on and I’ve adjusted my charging practices (I basically only charge the phone every other night now, especially if I spend a lot of time in the car connected to Android Auto), the overall capacity has improved to 97 percent.
