This is one of those features that makes you scratch your head as to why stock Android doesn’t have it after all these years. Yesterday, Google took a few stabs at Apple, basically saying they had widgets and stuff years ago. But here’s a really simple feature that Apple has had since the very beginning, and Android still doesn’t have it. The ability to show the battery percentage in the status bar. In fact, every skinned Android device has this as well. Touchwiz, Sense, Optimus UI, you name it, it’s there. Well it’s finally here in Android L, only it isn’t. You still need the Workaround app to get it working again. So you’ll need to use this app that we used in KitKat to get it in Android L, unfortunately. But the good thing is it no longer disappears, or decides not to work some of the time. So there’s that. It would still be nice to have an option in the battery screen in settings to enable it.
So I guess we are making progress now, but at least we do have other options. I usually use Battery Widget Reborn on my stock Android devices to see the percentage. But it’d be nice to not have to install an app for such a small feature, and one that should have been in Android a very long time ago. We might see this changed in the final version of Android L, if enough developers give Google feedback on this. As this is a developer preview, so things will change. Let’s hope they do.
The developer preview for Android L just went live today, so we are seeing more and more little things in this update that we’ll be writing about over the next few days. So be sure to keep it locked to Android Headlines as always.