How to turn on or off Adaptive Charging on your Pixel
Based on the current battery tech available for our smartphones, it comes with a finite number of charging cycles. A charging cycle, for those unfamiliar, is when a phone goes from 0% to 100% which counts as one cycle, and like we said, batteries in our phones, tablets, laptops, and wearables all come with batteries that have a limited number of cycles.
Once these cycles hit a certain mark, your phone’s battery will not be able to hold its charge as well as it used to when it was new, meaning that even though the battery percentage on your phone shows 100%, in reality it might only be at 80%.
To help deal with this, companies like Google have introduced smarter battery charging software that helps prevent your device from staying charged for too long. On Pixel devices, it’s called Adaptive Charging, and if you want to turn the feature on or off, here’s how.
Enable or disable Adaptive Charging
- Launch the Settings on your Pixel phone
- Tap on Battery
- Tap on Adaptive Preferences
- Tap the the toggle for Adaptive Charging to turn it on or off
Keep in mind that Adaptive Charging is meant to help prolong the battery health of your phone, but we understand that some of you might actually want to disable it.
For those who don’t know how Adaptive Charging works, basically what it does is that at night when you’re supposed to be asleep, it keeps the phone’s battery at 80% until it knows that you’re about to wake up (this is based on the alarms you set), after which it then allows the phone to charge up to full.
The idea is that this prevents your phone from cycling between 99%-100% until you unplug it, thus saving your charging cycles. But if you’re the type of person who works or keeps odd hours, then Adaptive Charging might be more of a hindrance than a benefit, so in this situation, turning it off might be better.