Android 15 may support NFC wireless charging

Currently, wireless charging on smartphones predominantly employs the Qi standard. Despite years of development allowing for higher charging powers, the large coils required preclude its use in smaller devices. In response, the NFC Technology Industry Association introduced NFC wireless charging in May 2020, developing the NFC Wireless Charging (WLC) specification.

The antenna used to implement NFC wireless charging can be less than 1 cm in size, not only significantly smaller than the coil area required for the Qi standard but also flexible. This allows the component to be integrated into extremely small smart devices, such as earbuds, styluses, and smartwatches. Moreover, the same antenna can also facilitate traditional NFC data transmission, thus conserving more internal space in devices.

Although NFC wireless charging technology has been available for four years, perhaps due to a lack of platform support, its adoption has been limited. However, according to a report by Android Authority, Android 15 might incorporate support for NFC wireless charging.

The report discusses findings from the recently released Android 15 beta 1, where the NFC API includes new functions related to WLC. Additionally, significant modifications have been made to the operating system’s NFC stack; for instance, the software that processes NFC events now resides within a class named NfcCharging, which enables starting and stopping NFC charging and reading charging information sent via NFC.

The article also mentions that Google initially attempted to support WLC technology in the Android system by the end of 2021, but the project was subsequently canceled for reasons not disclosed. Google has not explained why it has decided to revisit this project.