Sudden Drop in the Battery Level?: Understanding Smartphone State of Charge Anomaly

Battery State of Charge (SOC) estimation is a fundamental component of today's smartphones that affects the internal processes and observable behavior of the devices. This article systematically investigates and analyzes the SOC estimation techniques in smartphones. First, we discover that the voltage curve of a given smartphone implicitly captures the usable capacity of the battery while charging the mobile device. Second, we observe that today's SOC estimation techniques do not model battery capacity loss sufficiently to accurately capture the usable capacity. Finally, we report findings based on battery analytics of 2077 devices that validate the relationship between battery voltage and the usable capacity of a device. The presented results enable the development of more accurate battery gauges and metering solutions thus resulting in better power-saving decisions, recommendations for the users, and most importantly more reliable system.