What you need to know
- Google appears to be adding an Android 15 feature that will give you a better idea of the health of your phone's storage chip.
- While flash storage is generally considered to be extremely reliable, it can fail just like other smartphone components, and this feature will try and gauge how much life is left in a phone's storage chip.
- The upcoming functionality will work similar to battery health on Android, showing the health of a storage chip in the form of a percentage.
Flash storage is much more reliable than other types of storage, and it doesn't contain moving parts like hard drives do. However, it isn't completely failproof either, and that's why Google wants to show the remaining life of your phone's storage chip in Android 15. As Android Authority uncovered, Google plans to show your the health of phone's storage chip with a percentage in the next version of Android.
Android Authority notes that information related to storage can be found in the Device Diagnostics app. Additionally, more information about your phone's battery will be shown in Device Diagnostics as well. The storage health functionality is powered by a new API that "returns the remaining lifetime of the internal storage device, as an integer percentage."
So, a reading of 80 from the API would mean that only 80% of the chip's expected lifespan remains. It's unclear exactly how Android determines the health of a phone's storage chip; however, there are a handful of storage attributes that can be signs of a failing or degrading flash chip.
High temperatures can accelerate flash chip degradation, which is a concern on smartphones. There are plenty of ways that a smartphone is exposed to extreme temperatures, including wired charging, wireless charging, prolonged use, and extended periods of time in the sun. As such, the lifespan of a smartphone's flash chip is more important to monitor than, say, an SSD in a computer.
The remaining lifespan of an Android phone will be most accurate on Pixel phones, which report a percentage down to one percent accuracies. However, other Android phones merely provide percentages at 10% intervals. Some Android devices will lack the reporting functionality entirely and will be unable to show the percent of a phone chip's usable lifetime remaining.
We'll learn more about this feature in future Android 15 releases since Google's patch notes say it is "intended to be displayed to users" rather than for internal use.
