alt Hacker NewsI feel something is missing at the moment with our ability to choose on the device how I want it to charge. Would be nice to plug the phone in and unless I say otherwise it does a nice slow charge even if the cable and charger is capable of more. But if I press a button on the front after I plug it in then I can select fast and it goes as quickly as the combination allows. Its irritating to have to have different chargers for this to preserve the battery.
Its pretty bad that only recent phones have started to add the ability to charge to only 80% to keep the battery in the optimal zone to extend the life given how long we have known that 80% was the optimal maximum. There are also a few phones now able to power themselves from USB without using the battery which if you leave them in chargers a lot throughout the day and night seems like a good feature to have to preserve the battery further.
Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly but its pretty wasteful. We ended up going through lots of special chargers that all do very similar things and now you get a device and it often doesn't even come with a cable let alone a charger and you are digging through the specs of your charger, cable and device to work out if its all going to mesh correctly together or you'll be stuck on slow mode. We have ended up with so many standards for getting quicker than the basic charge its going to take a while for all these devices to age out and in the meantime chargers are going to be doing QC and PD and a host of other things besides for a while.
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Feel like all of this would be a bit irrelevant if we just had easily replaceable batteries. Phone batteries don’t cost that much.
Rather than worrying about charge speeds and charge %, I’d rather just slap a new battery in after 4 years.
Adaptive Charging on Pixel devices gets most of the way there: it will learn how long it's typically on the charger each day, and automatically slow the rate of charge to match, so that it finishes approximately an hour before you usually unplug it.
There's a manual option to turn it off (charge at full rate this time only), but not to manually turn it on (such as giving it a target time to be fully charged). Older Pixels used what time the alarm was set as the target time to finish charging, which I preferred as someone who doesn't wake up at the same time every day; I'm not sure why they took that away.
It is absolutely too much work. It's incredibly easy to get bogged into the weeds of config stuff like this and almost no one will care. if they did, I bet it's turn into a cluster of hearsay about magic settings that make almost no practical difference.
Also, I'd argue it's not obvious that 80% charging is better for most people. You're taking an immediate 20% cut to battery life, and chances are it will take years for it to actually be better than charging to 100%. I guess it's good to have the option, but only if you almost never need that last bit of capacity.
I actually built this for myself on my previous phone using Tasker. If you have root you can just set the charge voltage (basically redefining 100% as 4.1V or something to limit charge %) and current to whatever you want. It was especially nice to be able to limit the current to like 500mA while using Android Auto because GPS and data use gets the phone hot enough already. That phone's barely aged in the two years or so I had it.
On my current phone I use wireless charging overnight and the 80% limit and I think that gets me most of the benefits of that hacky solution without requiring root.
Google and Samsung phones have options to disable fast charging, though it's hidden in the system menus. Google phones have a feature that 'intelligently' (linear regression) scale down charge current at night so it reaches full just before your set morning time.
The Samsung phone I had was pretty good, you had separate options to disable fast charging on either wired or wireless.
But really my solution is quite simple: none of my habitual charging spots have a fast charger, they're all 5V 2A adapters. I do have a couple of fast chargers around the house, I just don't use them unless I really need to. It's a deliberate decision to fast charge.
That and where applicable I limit my devices to 80-90% full charge. My Linux thinkpad has firmware level support for this, it's very nice.
will change their phone regularly
Yeah, I need my phone to just last until the end of the day. The charger is on the night stand. To Android's credit, if I have an alarm set, it'll time the charge to reach 100% as the alarm goes off.
With these habits, I've never had to replace my phone due to the battery, so going the extra mile to preserve the battery seems like an exercise in futility...
I use ACCA[0] to select my charge rate and limit. This can also set battery idle mode (power from USB without using the battery) when the charge limit is reached if the hardware supports it. I usually limit it to 60%, and charge at 500mA when I'm not in a hurry.
Maybe that's too much fuss for most people, but I'm still using a five year old Pixel 4A on the original battery and its showing no signs of reduced battery performance. I probably wouldn't put in the effort if it was easy to replace the battery, but it is not. I might be a little less aggressive about it if I liked any current phones, but I do not.
Charge it up to 80% in the firmware but show 100% in the UI. Wear leveling algorithms probably do something similar already.
My Galaxy S21 lets me pick between normal, fast, or super-fast charging in the settings. Not quite one tap, but it does let you do it.
That said "super-fast" charging on it is like 18W and still about an hour from 20%, so it doesn't really qualify as fast charging IMO, and at an hour is certainly not going to be causing any excess battery wear. It's just normal speed.
PD was never deployed for USB-A and was removed from the most recent standard. The grandfathered nonstandard charging protocols will linger around so long as type-A ports are the default.
My hack is to only use fast charging bricks, but at home I charge my phone wirelessly. So that means in practice I rarely fast charge it.
Yes, it does heat up due to energy losses, but I suspect that's way less hard on the battery than the same amount of heat from actual high current charging (please correct me if I'm wrong).
This means the only drawback is that my phone charging is cost-inefficient.
Most multichargers solve it by having faster and slower charging ports. This may be not an app, but a nice / simple hardware based solution
> Maybe all the complexity around this is too much and people just want to plug it in and quick 100% as quick as possible and will change their phone regularly
It's this, 100%. The nerds that care about charge temperature and battery degradation and proliferation of incompatible charging standards are a rounding error, most people just want to know it can charge fast in case they forget and need to leave soon.
I am happy with my Chargie [1], an interposing dongle which provides a Bluetooth receiver and app that lets you set arbitrary preferences on your phone and fast charge, slow charge, or turn off the charger at configurable state of charge setpoints or times.
[1] https://chargie.org/product/chargie-c-basic/