16h ago

Google leaves older Pixels behind for Android's long-awaited Battery Health menu

www.androidauthority.com

TL;DR

Android’s long-awaited Battery Health menu has arrived in Android 16 Beta 3, but only for the Pixel 9 series and the Pixel 8a.
Google has confirmed that older Pixels, including the not-so-old Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, will not receive this feature.
The decision is due to unspecified “product limitations,” leaving aging device users without means for native battery diagnostics.

20 comments

Interesting that the 8a will get this feature. But, pixel 8 and 8 pro won't.
- I bought the 8 pro in part for the promise of 7 years of updates. 😕
  I understand not everything can come to old phones, maybe it depends on a battery management system feature that is missing in the 8 hw? Otherwise I'm disappointed for sure.
  Edit: the missing hw was already in the comments.... Read all comments before saying something 🤦‍♂️
- The 8 isn't even two years old.
- Pretty disappointed with Google dropping support of their own products like this.
  
  They literally sold the 8 on the promise of 8 years of support
  
  The cycle of planned obsolescnce continues
  
  Been really happy with support and updates from Graphene. Pretty simple nontechnical installation most users are capable of and no dodgy rooting/unlocking required. All supported officially with pixel line of phones. My banking apps etc all work fine because of this.
  
  I am buying a second hand 6a tomorrow, and was thinking of installing graphene or lineageos on it.
  
  I run 5's with Lineage. Because they're so cheap I have 3, one for testing, one as a hot spare.
  Still cost less than a new phone.
  
  Yeah the 6a will be my spare to my 7 pro
  
  I'm still rocking my pixel 5 because it works and the battery lasts me a full day if not more. I should probably look at loading graphene onto it.
- @limerod apparently it is a hardware limited feature. The original 8 doesn't have it
  
  Maybe, google should've included the necessary hardware if it was going to bring the feature to pixel down the line. 7 yrs of updates with missing features does not inspire confidence in them.
  
  So you would like them to put hardware into a model, made before they decided to add said hardware? So how about any new hardware added in the next Pixel, should they also have put that into previous Pixels?
  Software updates will always have hardware limitations
  
  Pixel 8 did not get the multi model Gemini update simply because it lacked the additional RAM needed for the LLM. Its the same with this feature. They brought battery health and charge counter in android 14.
  They could've bought this to pixel phones if google did not skimp on the hardware.
  Software updates will always have hardware limitations
  I know but, since they were going to work on this feature and had starting with android 14. It does not make sense to skimp on it for a year old hardware. Same with the RAM limitation on the pixel 8.
  
  @limerod they took a leaf out of Apple's playbook with this decision
  
  If they hadn't thought of the idea until say a year ago then it's not like they can go back in time or recall everyone's phones to install a piece of hardware
  
  They have been working on the battery health feature for a time. Android 14 brought the charge counter to supported phones. It would be unreasonable to say they did not know.
  
  Without knowing what these "product limitations" actually are then I think we're just arguing hypotheticals

20 comments