Android’s Battery Life Estimate is Getting Smarter and More Accurate on the Pixel 2

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Android has featured battery life estimates for a long time now. This estimate can give you an insight on how quickly your battery is draining, and how much time you have remaining until your phone reaches 0% and dies. However, this estimate was never really accurate for most cases, as your “10 hr estimate” could easily be reduced to 2 hours while playing YouTube videos or mobile games.

That’s because the estimate only takes into account the average of your usage since your last full charge, and uses this to determine how much you have remaining. Google is aiming to make this estimate more accurate than ever — at least on the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.

While both phones already feature great battery improvements, this is arguably one of the biggest changes regarding battery life. Now, instead of just looking at your current usage and calculating an estimate based on that, it builds up information of your battery usage with time, and takes into account similar days and times to predict your battery life in a more accurate and personalized way. If you’re the kind of person who likes to stream music on your way to work, or you like to binge Netflix during your Sunday nights, the Android system will take into account those habits to give you a more accurate estimate.

However, this personalized estimate is apparently exclusive to the Pixel 2 phones, and is not currently a part of Android as a whole.

According to the Google Product Forums announcement post, this feature is already rolling out to users and will likely become a standard feature for all Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL owners when the stable version of Android 8.1 rolls out. If you own one of these devices and you’re currently running the latest Android 8.1 Developer Preview on it, then have a look at the battery settings to see if the renewed battery life estimate is there. It’s not clear if it will make its way to the Google Pixel, Google Pixel XL, Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P, but we can always remain optimistic.