Among the many subtle changes made in Android Q, there is now time remaining on battery when you pull down the notification shade. This makes it pretty useful to see when your Pixel or other smartphone, is going to die, based on your usage.
It appears that this only shows up when you are not plugged in. So unfortunately, it does not show how much time until the battery is full. But don’t rule that out for the Android Q stable release when that comes later this year.
Obviously, you won’t be able to 100-percent trust the numbers that you see in the notification shade, as that is based on your usage. So if you’ve been using your phone a lot in the morning, it might tell you that your phone will die by noon, when that is likely not the case. So you’ll want to take this information with a grain of salt for sure. Even though Google is likely using the Adaptive Battery information to give you that number.
If the phone believes that it will die in less than 24 hours, it will give you an exact time, like 10AM. Otherwise it’ll say something like “1 Day, 4 Hours”, and then it should be almost dead.
This isn’t a feature that needs to be enabled, it’s available by default, which is a pretty good thing, when it comes to these features. As it means that it will likely launch with Android Q later this year, instead of being ripped out before Android Q goes stable around August/September.
Android Q is the newest version of Android, and it launched today in open beta. It’s a very early beta, so it’s not a good idea to put it onto your smartphone right now. Since it is going to be a pretty buggy build of Android Q. Google does this, so that it can get feedback from developers on what it needs to change. But it also allows developers to get their apps ready for Android Q when it does launch later this year. That way their apps are fully functional on day one, instead of users needing to wait for the app to get updated to support Android Q.
With Android Q, there are a few pretty big features that Google is touting. This includes the new share menu, that is now much faster and a bit more intuitive. Instead of it polling like it has done for many years on Android, it is now instant, as everything is already built-in. Another big feature of Android Q is the focus on privacy. Google is really focusing on privacy, and rightfully so. One of the main aspects is Google cutting back on which apps get location services and for how long. Giving location access to apps is a simple task, but does the app need location access all the time? Probably not. So you can opt to only give it access when the app is open. These are just some of the many features that are in Android Q.
