The Android 11 Developers’ Preview has been out for a while now, giving us a first look at what the operating system might bring when it’s fully released towards the end of 2020, and it looks like there might be a feature that helps with wireless charging.
When you put your smartphone on a wireless charger in the wrong place (so it’s not directly over the wireless charging module) an error message will appear prompting you to re-position the device.
This feature might help people with certain wireless charging pads, as well as those who are trying to use devices with wireless power-sharing, to make sure the phone is being charged as efficiently as possible.
Is it that useful though?
It can be annoying when a phone slips off a wireless charger, or if you hastily put your device down in the wrong position, but we’re not sure that anyone’s ever had the problem of not knowing if the device is charging.
Many smartphones have animations to show they’re wirelessly charging (like the Huawei Mate 20 Pro in the image at the top of this article), and it’s very easy to see if the battery icon at the top of the phone is charging or not, which is just as useful an indicator as to whether your smartphone is powering up.
So while this feature may not be groundbreaking, it perhaps serves better as an indicator of Google’s push towards more wireless charging for Android phones. The Developer Preview for Android 11 also showed a juicy tidbit of Google Pixel 5 information, suggesting it might have reverse power-sharing, so it seems that wireless charging and power sharing may be an emphasis for Android 11, in a similar way to how support for foldable operating systems was a big feature of Android 10.
