Android 15’s feature can check the health of your phone’s storage

Android 15 might roll out with a cool new trick up its sleeve: a nifty feature that keeps tabs on your phone’s storage health. Say hello to Device Diagnostics, as Android Authority caught wind of it in the latest Android 15 beta. It gives you the lowdown with a percentage meter, telling you how much space you’ve got left to play with on your device.

Even though your phone boasts a bunch of storage space on paper, a chunk of it gets used up by the operating system and built-in apps. And as time goes on, that speedy, compact, power-efficient universal flash storage (UFS) smartphones rely on can start showing signs of wear and tear. It’s all thanks to downloading files, snapping pics, and shuffling stuff around on your device.

It’s the sad truth for all types of storage – they all bite the dust eventually, taking your precious data down with them if you’re not careful about backups. Right now, there aren’t any handy tools to give your phone’s internal storage a health check, like the ones some phones have for keeping an eye on battery health. So, without any heads-up, your storage could go kaput, leaving you scrambling to salvage any valuable data you forgot to back up.

But hey, with Device Diagnostics on the scene, you could get all the scoop on both battery and storage health in one spot. It’s like having a personal detective to keep tabs on those components that tend to go downhill as time marches on.

Plus, it might even let you put your phone’s display and touchscreen through their paces to make sure they’re still kicking like they should. That way, you’ll know when it’s time to shuffle your files off to a new storage spot or upgrade to a shiny new device.

Device Diagnostics is still in the Android 15 beta phase. That means there’s no surefire guarantee it’ll make the cut for the official release. We’re betting on the full rollout happening sometime between August and October, but we’ll probably get the lowdown on all things Android 15 at the Google I/O 2024 event on May 14.

Even if Device Diagnostics does make it into the full Android 15 rollout, it might only be up for grabs on Google Pixel devices. Why? Well, not all Android gadgets spill the beans on the necessary info to the Android OS. So, there’s a chance it won’t dish out accurate storage lifespan deets or support at all for some devices.