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.
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.
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.
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
@limerod they took a leaf out of Apple’s playbook with this decision