Pulsestacks reported on April 19th that as major smartphone OEMs gradually begin to offer maintenance policies lasting three years or more, factors such as after-sales service, part replaceability, and the ability to self-repair have become increasingly important considerations for users when purchasing new devices.
Android Authority has discovered that Google is preparing a new feature for Android 15 that allows users to easily view the lifespan of their hardware, such as internal storage (ROM) chips.
In fact, Google added information related to battery health in Android 14 at the end of last year, but later removed it in the Android 14 QPR2 update in March of this year, indicating that Google has been paying attention to hardware lifespan issues for quite some time.
It's worth noting that information about remaining lifespan of storage chips and battery health needs to be accessed through the "Device Diagnostics" app. This app can leverage new APIs in Android 15 to fetch the corresponding data and "return the remaining lifespan of internal storage devices in integer percentage form." Simply put, if the API returns 90, it means that the storage chip still has 90% of its lifespan remaining.
Currently, this API has been enabled in the latest Android 15beta1 version, but not all devices support displaying the remaining lifespan of storage chips. Devices need to be able to collect the corresponding information through Health HAL and allow the Android system to read it. The role of the API itself is merely to provide the information collected by Android to system apps. On devices that do not support this feature, the API will return -1 (indicating that the feature is not available).
Google has merged the relevant code submitted to AOSP into its internal codebase, which will be used to compile its Android 15 version.
The initial patch description for implementing this new API indicates that it is only "slightly different from the previous API used for idle maintenance." The patch also mentions that the value is "intended to be displayed to users," but only certain devices (such as Google Pixel series) can display remaining lifespan with 1% accuracy, while other devices will display it with less accurate 10% precision.
Pulsestacks reminds that Google will not force OEMs to adapt this API, so whether your device can ultimately provide this functionality depends on the specific brand or storage chip manufacturer. However, it's undeniable that Google's own Pixel devices will definitely support it.
