Android 15 Will Let You Keep Tabs on Your Phone’s Storage Chip Health, Here’s How

We take for granted the work every component of our smartphone does daily. From taking photos to storing them and powering your long gaming sessions, the collaborative efforts make your experience better. However, these components tend to wear out over time, and adding features to keep track of their health goes a long way. Google recently added support for APIs that can get your device’s battery health and is now bringing to Pixels, the ability to check the health of your phone’s NAND flash storage.

Google’s new Storage Health API for DeviceDiagnostics, when called, returns the remaining life of your phone’s NAND flash storage. If the API returns the number 95, it means your storage chip’s health is 95.

Android expert Mishaal Rahman via Android Authority says the patch containing the health API hasn’t been merged with AOSP yet but the API is already present and enabled in Android 15 Beta 1. This is because the patch was already merged into Google’s internal Android codebase.

We’re not sure if Google intends to keep this a Pixel-exclusive feature. Remember, the feature shows the remaining lifetime and not the used lifetime. Besides, Google Pixel devices will report the remaining life much more accurately (with 1% granularity) while others at 10% granularity.

How to Check Storage Health in Android 15

There’s an app called Activity Launcher which you can download from the Play Store to check hidden activities in Android. Here’s how to check storage health using the same on Android 15.

1. Install the Activity Launcher app from the Google Play Store.
2. Search for DeviceDiagnostics, and tap the .MainActivity activity.

1. Tap on Component health and select Storage status.
2. The remaining health of your storage chip returned by the API would now show up.

The storage health of my Pixel 6 is 92%, which isn’t surprising because I’ve been using it extensively for three years, toying with custom ROMs, and frequently transferring my FLAC library to other places and to the Pixel.

Besides Storage health, there are two other options — Display test and Touch test. The former tests your display by displaying Red, Green, and Blue colors, while the latter is to test your touch screen by drawing on it.

Now that there are a few features in the Device Diagnostics suite, Google might be preparing to roll out a dedicated app that houses all these things. We could see the app arrive by the time the stable Android 15 update lands.

What are your thoughts about the storage chip health feature? What are some of the hardware tests you would propose for the Device Diagnostics app? Let us know in the comments below.