While Android's own battery stats have always been quite robust compared to, say, iOS, many have long yearned for even more practical but granular statistics to help them evaluate their device's power consumption. In the third Android 6.0 developer preview, Google has now added a new field to battery stats for individuals apps: usage of battery capacity in mAh.

Milliamp-hours are used (as opposed to milliwatt-hours) because this is how smartphone batteries are rated to consumers, and the unit more or less works if you just want a device-specific measurement of consumption. Of course, because it's a computed usage, it's hard to say how accurate or meaningful the figure really is (if you have any insight on this, feel free to enlighten us in the comments).

It may be a bit more "mental math"-friendly because instead of merely a proportion of 100, which is a bit abstract, you're getting a number that can be judged against the rated capacity of your battery. More information certainly can't hurt this part of the OS, I guess.

We saw this feature in an earlier state way back on the L preview, where the "Miscellaneous" section had fields for computed and observed power use (I'm really not clear on the distinction - M preview 3 only shows computed), but that was it until this latest preview of Marshmallow.

Thanks: Salman A.