Charging your phone to 100% isn’t the problem—this is
If you want to take care of your phone’s battery, setting a charging limit to prevent wear and tear may seem like a good idea at first glance. Batteries don’t like being almost full or almost empty, and the feature included in most new Androids and iPhones gives you an easy way to manage them.
However, if you pause and really think about it, giving up a fifth of your phone’s total battery capacity just to protect it in the long run is actually a huge tradeoff.
The 80% charge limit permanently reduces your battery capacity
It’s almost as if the battery is already old and worn out
Lithium-ion batteries don’t like to be too full or too empty; their optimal health is preserved if you keep them within the 20-80% charge range. Once a battery is near its maximum capacity, internal resistance increases and a higher voltage is required to continue charging, causing heat to build up and accelerate chemical degradation processes.
It’s a huge problem when you invest $1,000 in a phone hoping it will last three or four years, only to see the battery degrade after two years. While replacing the battery is one thing, spending over $100 just to restore its original lifespan doesn’t seem like a good deal compared to upgrading to a new device.
That’s why most smartphone manufacturers now offer an easy way to set a firm (or customizable) 80% charge limit, so your phone’s battery isn’t too full when you forget to unplug it. You still have to remember to charge the phone when the battery is too low, but at least that solves the overcharging problem, right?
Fake.
While setting the charge limit to 80% (or 85-90% if it’s customizable) seems like a great way to protect the battery health of your expensive new phone, you’re effectively compromising your battery from day one. Sure, it might degrade a little slower, but you also immediately lose 20% of your battery’s maximum capacity.
Assuming a battery loses about 4% of its capacity per year, that means your brand new phone has the same capacity as a five-year-old phone, from day one. And if you’re also careful not to let your battery drop below 20%, you’ll only have 60% of usable capacity left.
Additionally, any battery will eventually degrade with enough charge cycles, so you’re not even really preserving your battery’s health by limiting its maximum charge.
While you may not always need the 20% blocked by the charging limit, you can’t tell me there aren’t days you come home to a nearly dead phone because you didn’t have a charger or time to charge it.
Technically, you could turn off the limit on days when you need that extra 20%, but will you actually remember to do that?
For me, the answer is no. Even though my OnePlus 15’s massive 7,300mAh silicon-carbon battery can easily last two days, I still prefer to leave the house with a full charge if I’m going to be out all day.
Just unplug your phone about 80%
Don’t ignore low battery warnings either
Instead of setting a hard limit on your maximum charge, you should simply unplug your phone when it’s between 80 and 90 percent. Phones are designed to slow down charging speeds as they approach maximum, so it’s actually easier than it seems.
If you want to be extra diligent, you can set a custom charging notification with a unique sound that tells you the phone is at 80%. When you’re just using the phone at home, you can unplug it, but if you need all the battery you can get, you can ignore the sound and let the phone finish charging to 100%.
And if you’re the type of person who leaves your phone charging overnight so you have a full battery ready in the morning, there’s the adaptive/smart/optimized charging feature.
The exact name varies depending on the phone brand, but the underlying function is the same: the phone learns from your usage patterns and alarms to identify the time you usually wake up. It keeps the battery at 80% to prevent unnecessary wear and tear, then finishes charging to 100% just before unplugging.
This way you get most of the benefits of a hard 80% charge limit without sacrificing a fifth of your battery.
Fast charging makes this surprisingly easy
Charging slows down significantly as the battery fills up
The way modern fast chargers work goes hand in hand with creating the habit of unplugging a phone when the charge reaches around 80%.
This is because fast chargers only charge a phone extremely quickly when the battery is almost empty. As it fills up, charging speeds deliberately slow to reduce battery wear, with the slowest charging occurring in the last 20% or so.
If you save your phone while it’s charging, chances are you’ll get it in the 80-90% range, precisely when you want to unplug it anyway. Once you become familiar with how quickly your phone charges, you will subconsciously learn to predict when to unplug it.
My old phone supported 50W fast charging, and by keeping its battery in a 20-80% range without a hard limit, I was able to preserve its battery health reasonably well and didn’t have any major complaints even when the phone reached a full five years.
9/10
- Brand
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Ugreen
- Output power
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8.5W, 20W, 22.5W, 45W, 65W
The Ugreen Nexode Pro 65W USB-C Wall Charger doesn’t include a ton of connections, but anything you plug into one of the USB-C ports, or the single USB-A, is guaranteed to be charged lightning fast.
Modern phones already protect their batteries better than you think
They already have a small stamp at the top and bottom
One of the things you need to understand about modern smartphone battery charge percentages is that they are not firm numbers, but estimates. A 100% charge might actually only be 96%. Additionally, modern phones have a small reserve at the top and bottom of the battery to prevent major damage.
Between that and fast charging, it’s honestly hard to justify the inconvenience of living daily with 80% max battery capacity. Instead, I suggest taking a flexible approach to charging your phone: plug it in when it’s around 20% and unplug it when it’s around 80%. If you forget, it’s not the end of the world.
Extremely fast charging doesn’t harm your battery (but it does)
It turns out that loading speed isn’t the enemy.
