To prolong your battery’s lifespan you shouldn’t let it drain below 20%.

Don’t phone battery indicators lie to you now so that 0% displayed is actually about 20% specifically because of this?

For a phone, you’re probably going to keep it for less than 5 years, so babying the battery really isn’t worthwhile since the battery will probably outlast how long you keep your phone for if you just charge overnight every night or fully charge it daily

On my Pixel 1, I wasn’t careful about the battery, regularly draining it fully and then charging it to 100% (and leaving it on the charger for extended periods) and after 18 months, I was already looking into getting the battery replaced due to greatly reduced capacity.

At a friend’s suggestion, I installed Accubattery which alerts me whenever the battery is about to go outside the 20-80% window. I almost always unplug from the charger when I get to 80%. That second battery on the Pixel 1 kept most of its capacity for 4 years. Now my mom has that phone, with the same battery, and even though the capacity went down a bit since, it’s more than enough for her needs still.

Though some of the phone makers are finally getting the message that some of us want to keep a hold of our expensive phones for a long while. My new Pixel 8 has 7 years of security updates, which should work fine for my purposes. I’ll probably replace the battery somewhere in there, though.

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Yes and 100% isn’t 100%

People and their batteries though… It’s a futile obsession for some. It doesn’t matter how much science or logic you throw at them there’s always something.

Like how fast charging hasn’t for some time done like a full max rate for the entire time to keep heat within tolerances but still some people think doing the work themselves is somehow better thermal management than modern battery controllers to the point they think it will make a material difference.

Also charging it fully but I don’t know how important that one is.

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For lithium batteries (phone batteries) it’s actually more important than draining to 0. Many studies indicate that the average phone battery should last several thousand cycles while only losing 5-10% of total capacity provided it is never charged above 80%. Minimum % (even down to 0%) and charge rate below 70% is also unrestricted.

The tl;dr is that everytime you charge to 100% is the same as 50-100 charges to 80%. Draining a lithium chemistry battery to 0 isn’t an issue as long as you don’t leave it in a discharged state (immediately charging).

Just as important. And most phones these days have a setting to prevent it from charging to 100%. E.g. I set mine to stop at 90%.

I run grapheneos which doesn’t have that. I think if I get a smart plug I could use an automation in Home Assistant to turn the charger off.

Very important. Keep it between 20-80 is a good idea. I differs between different battery chemistries though.

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