Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- One UI Watch 8 could introduce a battery protection feature that limits charging to a certain percentage.
- Currently, Galaxy Watches will stop charging once the battery is full and trickle charge as necessary.
- This is similar to Pixel Watch’s upcoming Adaptive Charging or the Apple Watch’s existing Optimized Charging Limit.
One common denominator that presents itself with all consumer technology is battery degradation. Over time, a rechargeable battery will gradually lose its ability to store and deliver a charge, resulting in less efficient battery life. We’ve seen smartphones get a battery charging limit with Android 15, and that evolution may be continuing to wearables, based on evidence we’re seeing in Samsung’s work on One UI Watch 8.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
We spotted a string of code in One UI Watch 8 (remember, Samsung appears to be skipping One UI Watch 7 entirely) that indicates that Samsung could add a battery protection feature in its next iteration of One UI Watch. With battery protection, it will limit the charging of a Galaxy Watch to a certain percentage.
Kaitlyn Cimino / Android Authority
This would be similar to how Apple’s Optimized Charging Limit feature works on an Apple Watch. With the charging limit, an Apple Watch would learn the user’s charging habits and slow down charging to just 80% when it anticipates being plugged in for an extended period of time, such as overnight. This helps reduce the degradation on the battery and extend its lifespan.
Code
<string name="battery_protection">Battery protection</string>
<string name="battery_protection_maximum" formatted="false">Stop charging when the battery level reaches %d%% and start charging again when it drops down to %d%%.</string>According to the code string we see above for the Battery app (version 4.0.00.8), this feature will stop charging once it reaches a certain percentage and start charging when it drops below a specified threshold. Typically, we’ve seen charging limits set to around 80%, but companies like OnePlus are letting users set custom charging limits, increasing up to 95% in 5% increments Based on the variables Samsung includes in this string, it feels like we may get a similar implementation here.
Google is in the process of doing something just like this for the Pixel Watch. In an APK teardown we did earlier this year, we spotted code that showed Google adding Adaptive Charging from the Pixel phones to the Pixel Watch, though this feature has yet to actually be released.
We currently do not know when Samsung plans to add battery protection to the Galaxy Watch lineup. We’ll keep an eye out for further developments and let you know as soon as we get more details. Regardless, such a feature would be nice to have to extend the battery life as much as possible.
