No, Fast Charging Is Not Killing Your Phone’s Battery.
If you’ve ever been told that all fast charging kills your phone’s battery, today’s your lucky day.
While that fast charging mantra may have been the case years ago, modern smartphones have built in protections designed to last. The only thing surprising about this should be how long it’s taken to get to this fix.
“Generally speaking, fast chargers do not wear down batteries quicker. These days, you don’t need to worry much about damaging a battery by fast charging your phone. The most popular phones out there right now don’t charge all that quickly anyway,” said Christian de Looper, a consumer technology expert at HostingAdvice. “A phone can only charge at its own maximum speed, no matter what power adapter you use, and using one that exceeds that limit won’t damage the battery.”
In January 2019, Apple, the world’s largest technology company by revenue, launched its battery replacement program following the so-called ‘batterygate’ when the company was accused of slowing down older iPhones to encourage new purchases. This shined a new light on what smartphone batteries could and should be performing at — and consumers weren’t happy.
“Modern phones are designed to protect the battery for long-term use, which means regulating how quickly a device charges. Even with a charging adapter that supports the fastest charging speed a phone offers, it won’t charge at that speed from 0–100%,” said de Looper. “Instead, it charges quickly for the first few minutes and then gradually slows down as it nears a full charge.”
To appease the masses, battery management settings were implemented and with it came battery care settings. While the option to charge a phone to 80% for the day may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a feature designed to extend the life of a device’s battery through the learning of a user’s daily charging habits and regulating charging speeds.
Why is this necessary? Well, thanks to the phenomenon known as the memory effect, recharging a battery before it’s fully discharged can cause it to “remember” the semi-charged state and not recharge fully. Charging patterns and behaviors alone aren’t enough to induce this phenomenon, however. In the end, it’s a mixture of those habits, the battery type, poorly-designed chargers and other imperfections in the battery.
Battery type is one of the larger contributors to the phenomenon as nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries are more prone to failure as opposed to lithium-ion and lithium polymer batteries are more risk averse.
So, does your phone have a nickel-cadmium or a metal hydride battery? Likely not. The most common type of battery we’re seeing in smartphones today are lithium-ion with lithium polymer coming in at a close second and found in more laptop batteries and portable power banks.
“In recent years, we’ve seen phones from some Chinese manufacturers that are specifically marketed based on their charging speed and the ability to charge from 0–100% in a matter of 15 to 20 minutes. These phones still have protections in place to avoid some battery damage, but charging at those speeds regularly may cause issues after long-term use,” de Looper added.
Ultimately, your charging behavior is your own, but if you’re looking to charge faster than what the main markets are offering, make sure it’s limited to rare occasions.
