Question

How can I get battery level and state (plugged in, discharging, charging, etc)? I researched the developer docs and I found a BatteryManager class. But it doesn’t contain any methods, just constants. How do I even use it?

Answer 1

Tutorial For Android has a code sample that explains how to get battery information.

To sum it up, a broadcast receiver for the ACTION_BATTERY_CHANGED intent is set up dynamically, because it can not be received through components declared in manifests, only by explicitly registering for it with Context.registerReceiver().

public class Main extends Activity {
  private TextView batteryTxt;
  private BroadcastReceiver mBatInfoReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver(){
    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context ctxt, Intent intent) {
      int level = intent.getIntExtra(BatteryManager.EXTRA_LEVEL, -1);
      int scale = intent.getIntExtra(BatteryManager.EXTRA_SCALE, -1);
      float batteryPct = level * 100 / (float)scale;
      batteryTxt.setText(String.valueOf(batteryPct) + "%");
    }
  };

  @Override
  public void onCreate(Bundle b) {
    super.onCreate(b);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    batteryTxt = (TextView) this.findViewById(R.id.batteryTxt);
    this.registerReceiver(this.mBatInfoReceiver, new IntentFilter(Intent.ACTION_BATTERY_CHANGED));
  }
}