C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google has filed a patent that enables reverse wireless charging through a phone’s display.
- This would allow you to charge your earbuds or smartwatch without your phone needing to be face-down on a table.
- It’s just a patent, so there’s no guarantee this will ever come to fruition.
Reverse wireless charging is a nifty feature some of the best Android phones support. Using the wireless charging coil on the back of the phone, you can “leech” power from it and charge something smaller, such as a smartwatch or earbuds case. It’s a bit slow, and you need to get the placement of the other device just right, but it can come through in a pinch.
The biggest problem with this system, though, is that your phone becomes inoperable. It needs to be face-down on a flat surface for this to work, and there it must stay while your accessory slowly sucks some juice.
However, Google may have figured out an alternative way of doing this. As first spotted by @PatentPulse on X, Google has filed patent #US20250103116A1 that appears to allow reverse wireless charging through a phone’s display rather than its back glass. Check out the patent images below, which mainly focus on how this would work with a foldable phone during a video chat:
Despite the imagery showing this working on a foldable, this could apply to non-foldables, too. For example, a YouTube video could be playing in the upper-most quadrant of a slab phone while you charge earbuds in the middle, and you’d still be able to see the video just fine.
Interestingly, this patent information was once publicly available at the US Patent and Trademark Office. Now, it is no longer there. Thankfully, you can still find information on it at Patents-Review.com if you want to dive deeper.
As with all patents, though, take this with a grain of salt. Companies file patents like this all the time, not because they plan to institute them but because they want to claim the patent just in case it becomes useful later. As such, you shouldn’t expect this to come to a Google Pixel phone anytime soon. However, if it were to come to a smartphone in the future, it would likely first land on a Pixel since Google owns this patent.
What do you think? Would you use reverse wireless charging through a smartphone’s display? Let us know in the comments!
