Do you find that one of the first things you enable, or hack, into your new Android device is a battery percentage status at the top? Does your homescreen have at least one battery widget? Do you always put your smartphone in the same place because it gets the best signal and so therefore shows the lowest battery drain? When Android 5.0 Lollipop was announced, did you flick through all the hot air about material design straight to the bits about Project Volta, and pour over the details, then wonder when your favorite applications would be redesigned to take into account the new network scheduler? If the answer is yes to most of these, this article is for you! XDA member nihil0 has written a battery monitoring application called Ampere, which is designed to measure the charging and discharging current of our device batteries. It’s compatible with Android 5.0 Lollipop and upwards.
The application works by taking a median average charge or discharge of your battery and displaying this on the screen. The author recommends the application as a means of quantifying the various chargers that you might be using with your device, so that you can check a few things such as if the charger and cable you are using at the best combination for your device. There can be quite significant differences between different cables and the same charger, and of course, different chargers. The application can also show a difference depending on the applications running at the time. However, nihil0 is careful to point out that the milliamp display showing on the screen is merely an estimate but is for comparative purposes only.
nihil0 also points out that some devices produce wildly unstable results when charged with certain chargers, such as the Nexus 4; in these cases, the data produced from Ampere is not (yet) useful. Still, for the rest of us, this is a great little (the installation file is under 2 MB) application that can help us check on the quality of our chargers or USB cables. It’s free and, better yet, has no necessary special permissions. You can download it either directly from the XDA Forums (source link) of from the Google Play Store. If you do download this, be sure to let us know how you get on. If you subscribe to XDA, let the author know too.