Bluetooth Device Battery Indicators Are Coming To Android

One of the most terrible feelings as a commuter is hopping on the bus or subway and popping on your wireless headphones, only to realize they just ran out of batteries.

This will hopefully be remedied by a new feature designed to indicate Bluetooth battery levels that is now making its way to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Now users of Sony, Motorola, Google and other devices with near-stock Android software will now be able to tell the battery levels of their devices without having to access or download a third-party app. This could include headphones, headsets and more.

There’s not much of an idea in terms of what the final version of the battery indicator will look like, but the addition of this new fix (in the form of an API) to the AOSP means that developers can implement and tweak the feature however they like. This feature has been present on several ROMs and devices from certain manufacturers, but the addition here will be welcome for many users.

Google is preparing to add APIs to “retrieve battery level information of remote devices” and “notify that a user’s battery level has changed.” The source code also reveals that battery information will be available in percentage or notification form instead of a harder to read image.

This new feature will not ship with the upcoming Android 8.0 release, but could make it onto 8.1.