How I checked the battery health of my Android phone 🔋

My smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite, which has been my daily driver for a year and a few months, has a 4500mAh Li-Po battery ("lithium-ion polymer" – like lithium-ion, but with solid or gel-like electrolytes that allow a thinner design). My smartphone can be charged with a maximum of 45 watts. The included charger, which I always use for charging, delivers a maximum of 25 watts.

So much for the physical specifications.

So far, my charging behavior has always been as follows: I usually charged the smartphone from around 20% to 100% overnight every other day and then disconnected it from the power in the morning. It usually lasts two days easily, unless I use it a lot. On average, I use it 2 to 4 hours a day, whether it’s for messaging, watching videos or reading the latest news.

However, I recently had the impression that the battery lasts less long. At times I had two SIM cards inserted in parallel, which would explain higher power consumption, but even with only one SIM card left, I felt that the battery was not lasting as long as it once did.

However, since this can be very much related to my usage patterns (do I use my smartphone more now that I no longer have a limit on data volume while on the road?), I wanted to investigate this more factually for once.

iPhones with iOS, as far as I know, directly have a feature that shows the remaining maximum capacity of the battery. Apple was criticized some time ago for reducing performance on older iPhones with not the best remaining maximum capacity to preserve the battery. With Android or One UI (Samsung’s Android overlay), there is no such display.

However, an app called “AccuBattery” can help, which I installed after my concerns to have a look at how the battery health of my smartphone really looks like.

AccuBattery continuously measures how much power is going out of the battery and how much is going in. It also looks at which app is currently open and whether the screen is even activated at any given time.

Additionally, AccuBattery also sends a notification when charging when a certain charge level is reached. It is not recommended to charge the smartphone up to 100%, but to stop much earlier, at about 80%, because that consumes fewer charging cycles and the more charging cycles are consumed, the further the maximum capacity drops.

AccuBattery explains the technical background of the hints and tips on a help page and also shows studies that have examined the life of lithium-ion batteries under certain conditions.

After 10 charging sessions with a total of 457% charge and 19412 mA charged, AccuBattery shows me a battery health of 94% of design capacity and an estimated capacity of 4248 mAh. So not that bad after more than a year.

Then it’s probably due to my increased smartphone usage after all. 😅 I will continue to monitor this and now continue to pay attention to a better charging behavior so that I can use my smartphone for a few more years.

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