rewrite this title Android may soon make the battery icon a whole lot more colorful

Google doesn’t change up Android’s user interface all that often, much to the dismay of vocal power users online. The upcoming Android 16 update, for example, doesn’t look all that different from last year’s release or the previous year’s. However, we know that Google is hard at work revamping Android’s UI, as we’ve seen extensive evidence of various UI changes in the past few months. One area that we thought Google had abandoned was the status bar, but in the most recent beta release, we discovered that the company has renewed work on revamping the status bar icons, including a new battery icon that’s more colorful.

Last year, we discovered that Google was preparing a revamped status bar with new icons and haptics. We found some new icons for various status bar elements like the Wi-Fi signal strength, mobile data signal strength, airplane mode, and battery level. Considering that Google hasn’t tweaked the basic design of these icons since Android 5.0 Lollipop’s release in 2014, we thought the changes were pretty noteworthy. Some people weren’t fans of the new icons, though, so we were curious if Google planned to change them up before release.

Months passed by with no signs of the new status bar icons, even though the other changes we spotted—the haptic feedback for the Quick Settings panel and volume slider—landed in the stable release of Android 15. Google experiments with UI changes all the time, so we simply thought that Google may have scrapped its plans to roll out the new icon designs. Fast forward to the release of Android 16 Beta 3 the other day, though, and we now have evidence that Google is back at work on the new status bar icons.

The status bar icons for Wi-Fi signal strength, mobile signal strength, and battery level we spotted last year. 

While digging through Android 16 Beta 3, we spotted some changes to the new status bar icons for Wi-Fi signal strength and battery level. The Wi-Fi signal strength icon is largely unchanged from last year, except it now displays three segments instead of five.

The updated status bar icon for Wi-Fi signal strength we spotted in Android 16 Beta 3.

The battery level icon, however, is significantly different, showcasing a dynamic color scheme. Instead of a constant white background, the new battery level icon we enabled in Android 16 Beta 3 has different background colors depending on the battery status. When the battery is sufficient and not charging, the background color is solid white. When the battery is low and not charging, the background color turns red. Finally, when the device is charging, the background color turns vivid green.

The new, more colorful battery level icon that Google is testing in Android 16 Beta 3.

Other notable changes include a new, bolder font for the battery level percentage and a flipped orientation for the icon itself. I also noticed that the new battery icon only appears on the lock screen and the notifications panel, but that could just be a bug.

The current battery level icon in Android 15.

Because these new status bar icons are not enabled in Android 16 Beta 3, I had to manually enable them for this article. There’s no guarantee Google will roll out these new icons, and if they do, it’s unlikely they’ll appear in the stable Android 16 release. Instead, they might appear in a quarterly Android 16 release or in next year’s Android 17 update, ideally alongside the overhauled notifications and Quick Settings panel.