Charging smartphones only up to 80% significantly reduces battery degradation, as lithium-ion cells stress most when fully charged. After adopting this for a year, my phone’s battery health stayed at 94% vs. friends’ 78% averages. The trade-off? Keep a portable charger handy for evenings out and disable overnight charging alarms. Skeptics argue it’s too obsessive, but automating cutoffs via built-in phone settings (like “Optimized Charging”) balances effort and gains. What compromises have you made for long-term device health?
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I’ve set my phone to stop charging at 80% using the built-in settings, and I carry a portable charger for longer days. It’s a small adjustment for better battery longevity.
How does one get 94% battery when only charging to 80%
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I use adaptive charging. This phone is a year and a half old and I still finish most days with over half my battery left.
My only thing with this is if I’m already gonna carry around a power bank like twice the capacity of my phone then why do I care if the integrated one is 70% or 90% health
Go to BATTERY in your phone settings and there is usually an easy way to set this up
I mean I had an S9 until very recently that I had at 100% and below 20% all the time. Battery health certainly wasn’t perfect but the device was also seven years old.
I’ll answer your question “what compromises did you make for long term device health” with a question, “what is long term to you” and my answer is that I didn’t compromise and it ended up being fine for my use. I’d still end a day at 40% on normal use.
real tip for people who actually keep phones more than 2 years
charging to 100% every night isn’t just overkill—it’s slow death for lithium cells
the 80% rule sounds obsessive until you realize most battery degradation comes from that top 20%
and yeah, it’s not about being glued to a charger all day
just:
worth it if you’d rather not drop $1k every other year just ‘cause your phone taps out at 2pm