Yesterday, the first developer preview for Android 14 launched, and since then, many have been digging through to see what’s new this time around. One feature that many are going to be excited about, are the changes to the battery usage screen. Google revamped this screen with Android 12 a couple years ago, which made it pretty useless. But now, it’s going to be slightly less useless.
One big change that people are noticing in the Android 14 Developer Preview is that the screen on time is being put more prominently on the screen here. Now, right below the graph, you’ll see “Screen time since last full charge” with the amount of time right below it, in a fairly large font. Making it a lot easier to read.
Previously, you would need to scroll all the way to the bottom and open up the “System Usage since last full charge” just to see that metric. So it’s a really nice change here.
This continues Google’s walkback of changes to the battery life screen
In Android 12, Google moved to a rolling 24 hour screen for battery usage. Which was pretty dumb, to be quite honest. Instead of showing from the last full charge, or even just that day, it was a rolling 24-hour period. Which normally includes some charging too. It also only updated every two hours. Making the graph pretty useless.
In the QPR1 update for Pixel phones late last year, that was walked back, and moved to just since the last full charge. As it should have always been. Now, Google is making the screen time number a lot easier to see in Android 14. So it makes you wonder why they even made the changes in the first place.
Anyways, this is just one of several changes in the first developer preview of Android 14. We haven’t even seen the big changes that are coming in Android 14 yet, as those will come at I/O in May.