To check the battery level of your wireless Xbox One Controller is not that trivial on a Windows 10 PC. You might think that Microsoft gives you a working solution out of the box but I was spending quite a lot of time finding out what is the right way to do it. It turns out there isn’t an official solution that works well. But thanks to the developer community there is a smart solution that helps. So let’s see what are the options you can choose from.
The Official Solution from Microsoft
The Xbox App
This should be the best since, it is Microsoft with their own stuff, right?
On Windows 10 the Xbox App is pre-installed. It gives you a lot of Xbox goodies but nothing about your accessories. So do not waste your time on it to check the battery level.
The Xbox Accessories App
For the Xbox One Controller Microsoft wrote an app called Xbox Accessories. Here you can update your controller’s Firmware, remap your keys, and of course, you should be able to check the battery status of your controller. Now here is the problem with the app. It cannot see your controller unless you plug it in with a cable.
When you do so, the battery status indicator only says: “Battery level: Plugged in”.
Not so useful if you only want to see if you should charge or not your controller.
The Steam Solution
The mostly OK solution.
If you have Steam installed, when you are in Big Picture Mode you can find this nice battery indicator logo on the top right corner.
If the battery indicator icon is missing you can check the controller settings out in the Settings by clicking on the gear icon.
Here you might see this icon on the top right corner next to the clock.
If you still do not see it, you might want to go to the Controller Settings section to check out if your controller is recognized by the system.
If it is you can check out the “Identify” button.
For some reason sometimes it is not enough and it still won’t show the battery icon for the controller, but when I repeated the same steps for a few times it actually showed up.
The Open Source Solution from GitHub (The Dev Community)
https://github.com/NiyaShy/XB1ControllerBatteryIndicator/releases
And also the best solution I have found so far.
It is initially implemented by Robert Beekman (on GitHub as SpoinkyNL) and further polished by NiyaShy
This solution is hosted on GitHub as an open source project. If you want you can read everything it can do and also you can contribute to it if you feel so.
It is a really discrete app, that shows a little icon in your start menu as a status indicator for your Xbox One Controller battery. Can you spot it?
When you hover over, it displays a more detailed status.
It also claims that it works with multiple Xbox One Controllers as well that I couldn’t test and confirm yet. Let me know in the comments if it really does.
Other solutions in the comments
If you know other solutions that work or if you have anything to add to this post to help the Windows 10 gaming community please leave it in the comments below.
Thank you and have a great gaming day 😉
