dumpsys battery

read-only

The battery service's live state: level, status, health, voltage and temperature.

Command: adb shell dumpsys battery
Commands: System services (dumpsys)
Risk: read-only

Syntax

dumpsys battery

Examples

```
dumpsys battery
```
One snapshot of everything the service knows.
```
cat /sys/class/power_supply/battery/current_now
```
Cross-check the charge current against the kernel, whose unit is fixed by the power-supply class rather than by the OEM.

Reading the output

Sample output

Current Battery Service state:
  AC powered: false
  USB powered: true
  Charge counter: 3110000
  status: 2
  health: 2
  level: 71
  scale: 100
  voltage: 4038
  temperature: 302

An indented `key: value` list. The units are the trap, because three different Android sources report temperature on three different scales: here it is tenths of a degree Celsius, so `302` is 30.2 °C. Read fields by name, never by position — OEMs insert their own lines anywhere in the list.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
level / scale	Charge as level out of scale. `scale` is 100 on every shipping device, and it is printed so nobody has to assume it.
status	1 unknown, 2 charging, 3 discharging, 4 not charging, 5 full.
health	2 good, 3 overheat, 4 dead, 5 over-voltage, 6 unspecified failure, 7 cold.
voltage	Millivolts, so `4038` is 4.038 V.
temperature	Tenths of a degree Celsius: `302` is 30.2 °C.
Charge counter	Microamp-hours: `3110000` is 3110 mAh.
Max charging current / voltage	Microamps and microvolts respectively.

Version and vendor notes

Stock Android prints neither a charge current nor a cycle count here. A phone that shows `current now` or `cycle count` has an OEM-patched dump, and both the sign and, on some builds, the scale of that current field vary — so treat its magnitude with suspicion and get the direction from `status` instead.
`(UPDATES STOPPED -- use 'reset' to restart)` means somebody injected values with `dumpsys battery set` or `unplug`. Everything below that line is fiction until `dumpsys battery reset`.
Temperature here is tenths of a degree, `/sys/class/thermal/*/temp` is thousandths, and `dumpsys thermalservice` prints plain degrees as a float. Mixing them up is a factor-of-ten error in either direction.

We have a UI for this

Android Battery Health runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android Battery Health

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as dumpsys battery.

Command	What it does
dumpsys thermalservice	Whether the phone is throttling, and every thermal zone the hardware layer reports, in degrees Celsius.
top	A one-shot process table: CPU share, memory, state and command line.
dumpsys meminfo	Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size.

More System services (dumpsys) commands

Command	What it does
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.
dumpsys sensorservice	Every sensor the phone has, with its vendor, type, rates and batching — plus a buffer of recent readings.
dumpsys package	Everything the package manager knows about one app: version, paths, flags, install source and per-user state.
dumpsys activity activities	Which app is in the foreground, and the task and stack structure behind it.
dumpsys dropbox	The platform's ring buffer of crashes, ANRs and tombstones — how you read ANR traces without root.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run `adb shell` on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use `adb exec-out` instead of `adb shell`: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the `shell` user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most `dumpsys` services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through `run-as` on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading `/data/anr` directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits `dumpsys` hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop `adb server` has to be stopped first, and `adb forward` and `adb reverse` cannot work in a browser at all.

Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.