We all love our phones, which makes the idea of running out of battery in the middle of your workday a true nightmare. A lot of us try our best to extract the most out of our phone’s batteries, but there’s a ton of outdated advice on the internet that might be doing your battery more harm than good. On the flip side, a single setting can stretch your phone’s battery way further than you think.
Modern smartphones come in various battery types, capacities, charging speeds, and capabilities. They’re also incredibly hard to kill quickly, unless you’re following myths that might be ruining your phone’s battery life.
5
Don’t let your battery die before charging
Letting your phone die first isn’t doing your battery any favors
This one is a classic myth that I’ve personally corrected for dozens of people I know. There’s a common misconception that running your battery down to 1% before plugging your phone in for charging is a good practice. In reality, it’s terrible advice.
The myth comes from a time when phones had nickel-cadmium batteries that suffered from something called memory effect. This phenomenon occurs when repeated, partial discharges and subsequent recharges result in a temporary, reversible reduction in the battery’s overall capacity.
Modern smartphones use lithium-ion batteries that are immune to this. In fact, they hate being completely drained. Consistently letting your battery drain completely can harm it over time. These batteries work best when kept between 20% and 80% charge. However, you can still charge your devices to 100% with no worries.
4
Charging overnight destroys your battery
They’re called “smart” phones for a reason
If you’ve been waking up in the middle of the night to unplug your phone, you can comfortably go back to sleep. No, your phone won’t “overcharge” just because you left it plugged in overnight.
Modern smartphones have built-in protection that stops the charging process once the battery reaches 100% capacity. Additionally, a lot of phones also include charging optimization features that learn your charging routine and vary the charging time to ensure you wake up with a 100% charge without disturbing your sleep.
Usually, these settings slow down the charging on your phone to reach 80% capacity just before your usual wake-up time. Then, they speed up charging so you wake up with close to 100% battery ready to go.
This stands true for pretty much every modern device, including wearables and laptops. There’s no such thing as overcharging in modern electronics. If there were, a lot of tech would be blowing up around the world. Your device has a built-in protection mechanism that knows what to do when your battery is fully charged and you haven’t unplugged the charger.
3
Fast charging will destroy your battery
Your phone can manage quick power-ups without frying itself
Honestly, I fell for this one in the beginning as well. It makes sense, as you pump in more and more power into the battery, it’s bound to get hotter. Overheating isn’t a great thing for any electronic component, let alone batteries.
Just like your phone has systems built in to protect itself from overnight charging, it has systems to protect the battery while charging it as fast as possible. As the charging rate increases, so does the battery temperature. Your phone and charger are constantly communicating with each other and adjusting the charging speed to ensure your battery doesn’t reach critical temperatures.
This is why your phone refuses to charge quickly when it gets too hot. The charging protection circuitry in your phone and a compatible charger are constantly monitoring parameters like temperature, voltage, and current, and making adjustments in real-time to give you the best possible charging speed without damaging the battery.
Overall, the pros of fast charging far outweigh any potential cons. This is why I prioritize fast charging over battery capacity every time I’m considering a phone, whether as a purchase or a recommendation.
2
Closing background apps saves battery life
Your habit of swiping apps away might be hurting performance instead
This is another one of those logical precautions that should be saving battery life. More apps running in the background mean your phone is consuming more power and, hence, more battery drain. Turns out you might be wasting battery by actively closing background apps.
Your phone’s memory management automatically loads and unloads apps from the memory as and when you need them. When you manually close apps, your phone has to load them into memory from scratch, which not only results in a longer loading period but also a spike in energy consumption.
These are minuscule changes, but they add up over time and can cause your phone to feel sluggish or even heat up. Of course, as your phone consumes more energy to keep everything running, you’ll also be running out of battery faster.
So let your phone deal with inactive apps the way it knows best. There’s no reason for you to be force-closing apps, thinking it’ll save memory or power—it won’t.
1
Wireless charging ruins battery life
Going cable-free is safe for your battery
This is one of the newest myths on the block, and it’s a popular one, too. If you see your phone getting warm on a wireless charger and think that might be harming your battery, I won’t blame you. However, just like with fast charging, your phone knows how to handle that heat.
Your phone is bound to get a little hot when charging wirelessly, as some energy gets lost during the wireless transfer. While heat isn’t the best thing for your battery, your phone knows when it gets too hot and either slows down or stops charging the battery.
The real culprit here isn’t wireless charging. Excessive heating during wireless charging might happen due to a number of reasons, including using cheap, uncertified chargers, using a thick case that traps heat, or the coils in the charger not lining up with the charging coils in your phone.
The overheating and slow charging issues were the reason why I went back to cables after trying wireless charging for a year. However, newer phones, especially with Qi2 or MagSafe support, fix a lot of these issues by ensuring your phone lines up with the wireless charger’s coils as accurately as possible. This is one of the reasons why Pixel 10’s Pixelsnap is a bigger deal than you might think and why I was finally able to go all-in on wireless charging.
Honestly, the more worried you are about protecting your phone’s battery, the more advice you’ll find on the internet. However, a lot of what you’d end up doing to protect the battery actually goes against your phone’s internal systems that make sure your battery remains healthy as long as possible.
Smartphone batteries only have a limited charge cycle, which means they’ll eventually run out and degrade. The degradation can take years to kick in, and you’ll be well due for an upgrade by the time the battery starts acting up—assuming your phone’s manufacturer doesn’t roll out an update degrading the battery’s performance on purpose.
You don’t need to do anything to protect your phone’s battery. Your phone is smart enough to take care of itself. Use and charge it the way you like. It’s going to take a lot more than overnight charging or unused background apps to ruin your phone’s battery life.
