GoKawiilRobert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR Google is working on a new AI-powered “Battery Usage Summaries” feature for Pixel devices.
It will use Gemini Nano for on-device analysis of battery usage patterns and also offer tips to improve battery life.
The feature will include only apps actively used in the last 14 days and will exclude system apps from its analysis.
It seems phones are getting bigger batteries every year, yet it’s still hard to know exactly how long your phone’s battery will last. While most phones, including Pixels, have a battery usage section, it’s basically just a generic graph showing battery drain. However, Google seems to be working to make the battery health section on Pixel devices more useful and easier to understand.
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Android 17 QPR 2 Beta 3 contains a bunch of strings hinting at a new “Battery usage summaries” feature Google is working on. With a bit of tinkering, we managed to get it to show up on our Pixel.
The battery summaries feature will be accessible from the three-dot menu icon in the Battery Health section. There, users can enable or disable it. It’s not fully functional yet, and enabling the feature just showed an error saying, “Device Health services not responding. Check back later.”
The summaries will not include battery usage by system apps, since those can’t be disabled. Instead, the feature will focus solely on apps actively used within the last 14 days to generate battery summaries. It will also provide personalized tips to improve battery life.
Additional strings we found in the code suggest the feature will use Gemini Nano to generate battery summaries locally. Google will also highlight on-device processing in the feature’s description. However, this means that battery summaries will most likely not be available on Pixel devices that don’t support Gemini Nano. As a result, devices older than the Pixel 8 series are unlikely to get the feature.
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