Google wants to reduce hearing loss with Android 14's latest safety feature

While I like the concept, I don't think it's going to be very useful

A given volume, e.g. 50% can be vastly different on different headphones/earbuds. Only really useful on 1st party products

For me personally, I connect my phone to my car and always have my phone's volume at 100% for the Bluetooth because I control the volume with the physical knob in the car.
- Man, I hate that BlueTooth doesn't have an equivalent of "line-out" that isn't affected by the host devices' volume settings. It's so annoying when I can barely hear my music because I turned the volume way down on my phone while watching a video late last night.
- Haha yea another good example of this not working as intended
- This feature is only for wired headphones. They can not reliable calculate it for Bluetooth audio devices because of this very reason.
It's should to be close enough, the spec is called sensitivity (SPL) and most headphone manufacturers try to hit around 100dB/mW.
Hopefully the setting would allow you to fine tune it based on what headphones you have.
- Where exactly are you seeing that most manufactures are aiming for that spl?
  
  I own many headphones all with vastly different sensitivities. And headphones are almost always far less sensitive than IEM's

This is a good feature if and only if there is an official way to turn it off. I do like that it might actually give you info on how loud it is, although I'm not sure how well that'll work. This can't possibly work as intended on all sound outputs, as some get much louder than others.

If you’re wondering, no, Android does not track the sound dose for music played over Bluetooth speakers or headphones, as the actual sound level of these devices can be set independently of the Android device.

Apparently, it will not work for Bluetooth audio devices. With wired being used less overall. Makes this feature a bit redundant unless they add support for Bluetooth.

Or if, for the love of god, they give us back our headphone jacks.
- Even with wired headphones, the volume setting didn't directly correspond to a decibel level. High quality headphones often have a higher impedance than cheaper ones, which makes them much quieter (unless you use an external amp). The automatic volume reducer thing was just always pretty frustrating in the past.
- Or at the very least a 2nd USB type C port. Personally, use wireless wouldn't mind using wired if my future phones were guaranteed to include that option.

Android devices sold in the EU display a warning when headphones are connected and the user tries to raise the output volume level above 85 dB

No the don't, they pop that up when you try to raise the volume above some arbitrary percentage. What volume that corresponds to depends on the audio hardware, it might be barely audible. And now they're apparently gonna make that crap even worse.

I had no idea this was eu specific..

It's annoying because I use my car volume knob, and keep my phone at max volume. It's a pain when I'm driving and it cuts down the volume due to "extended amount of time at high volume"
- Same here. I have to turn the phone up to max and the car stereo up to near max for it to be audible

angry audio engineer noices

I'll probably turn it off anyway when it pops up the first time.

O go fuck yourself Google .I do not need more bushit pop ups asking if I'm sure when I want my phone to do things.

So, wait, they're seriously going to make this function MORE annoying than it already is?!

Not too different than an old iPad, or maybe it was an iPod, used to do to me, when I'd listen for a while then it would just get quiet and I'd see that the screen had a volume warning on it.
Not new in general, but still good and valuable that it's being implemented more.

The bigger hitch/conundrum is getting people to care, on the personal/listener level, since, as we're aware, corporations profit off of us every second and would throw us all away if it earned them more money, so they're of course going to kinda half-ass the effort and let us keep letting our hearing systems go bad.
It doesn't help that under like 25 years old and you're still not really even perceiving the future as "real" yet.

WHAT?

I love the thumbnail.

ok glad its not just me who had that thumbnail lmao