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No, its not. Deep battery discharge and high heat can reduce your battery lifespan more compared to charging to 100%. You only save a few percentage of battery health at most after 500 charge cycles. Modern day smartphones do not simply charge to 100%. They use multiple heuristics and algorithms to only charge to 100% when necessary.
Anyway, if you really want maximum battery health. Charge from 20%-80%. But, You would in effect be artificially limiting yourself to 60% and be frequently connected to the charger. Also, you would be micromanaging the tech and, not lettin tech do things for you.
Here’s an awesome video by HTX studios who did a battery test for 2yrs: https://youtu.be/kLS5Cg_yNdM
Most phones should have a setting to stop charging at 80%. My last 3 phones did at least.
Yes, you can limit charging to 80%. Many phones have this feature. But, it still feels like micromanaging tech. Not letting it drop below 20%, being limited to 60% capacity.
I dont particularly watch out for charging before 20, most of the time I just charge it whenever, between 30 and 50 most of the time. Also most phones have a notification when going below 20. Its limiting, yes, but no need for micromanaging if you dont want to.
Anyway, everyone can do what feels right for them.
My phone has a option in battery settings for setting max charge to 80%.
That’s conventional wisdom for lithium ion batteries. Keeping it between 20 and 80 percent will extend its life. But that doesn’t mean charging or discharging it fully will be bad immediately; the effects are small but cumulative. And while battery tech improves, this guideline will probably be less important.
“Bad” is relative, but it does reduce the long-term lifespan of your battery. Ideally you should charge to 80%, but if you actually need the 100%, I wouldn’t worry about it either.
Charging limit features exist for a reason and not just in phones. EVs have the same problem with charging over night. The best thing to do is not to drain it too low or charge it too high. The orange line (65-75) is probably not realistically doable, but the purple (45-75) should be doable for most people that arent constantly hanging on their phones.
As you can see going low is not as bad as going high because 25-75 is much better than 50-100 even tho the difference is 50% in both cases.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/90983/why-charging-your-gadgets-over-80-is-such-a-bad-idea
https://www.roulonselectrique.ca/en/toutes-les-actualites/recharger-son-vehicule-electrique-a-80-ou-a-100/
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries
So if an average phone user charges his phone daily for 3 years, he’ll reach 1000 cycles or so. Doing 100-25% as the worst possible daily every time, that battery would have 90% of its original capacity. So 5 Years should be something like 1800 cycles, which should be 85% capacity on a 5 year old phone. I’d probably use those 15% up within 2 hours, and my phone can do about 1,5 days on average on a 100% charge. 5 years is IMHO good enough for a daily phone.
I think I can live with charge whenever however long. But I keep an eye on keeping it cool during charging, which I think is more important for battery life.
These are lab conditions, so in reality the degradation is probably quite a bit worse. In practice your battery will reach temperatures ranging from 10-50°C (or much more if you leave it in the sun) for example. High heat especially can cause battery aging to progress at 2-3 times the normal rate. Its also not evident from this graph if these cycles were going from 25-100 and then immediately back down to 25% or if the charge was stuck to 100% for 6h like it is on a real phone that gets charged over night.
5 years is IMHO good enough for a daily phone.
Its better than the current situation, but fundamentally phone hardware hasnt really changed in the last 10 years. There isnt really any reason to not use one phone even longer than that. The Fairphone 6 is promising 8 years of software updates for example.
Fairphone also lets you change out the battery very easily, so it’s not that big of a deal if it degrades. You might save the world 20% of a battery’s worth of e-waste by micromanaging your charging, which won’t really make a difference.
Spot on, batteries are supposed to be consumables that are easily swapped out, but manufacturers are keen on sealing the battery inside so that the whole device becomes a consumable from the perspective of an average consumer.
