We asked, you told us: Many are charging their phones all night, every night

I’ve been thinking a lot about battery degradation lately. With new and exciting quick charge tech coming out every few months, companies are touting super-fast charge times, even on phones with big batteries. But one thing they don’t advertise is how badly some of these quick charge methods degrade your phone’s battery over time.

Let’s talk about Oppo’s new 125W Flash Charge. OPPO says it can charge your 4,000mAh battery from 0-100% in just 20 minutes. That is insane. However, OPPO also tells us it can “maintain” 80% battery capacity after 800 full charge and discharge cycles at this 125W speed. In theory, upon reaching that 800-cycle mark, your 4,000mAh battery will act more like a 3,200mAh battery. Also insane, but not in a good way.

That’s what prompted me last week to ask you about your phone charging habits. Are you an all-night charger? Or do you only charge up your phone when it’s getting low? Out of over 1,900 total votes, the Android Authority community seems to be split.

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When do you charge your phone?

Results

Coming in first place with 851 votes, 44.72% of Android Authority readers said they don’t have a set routine for charging their phones. You can see many of these comments below — a lot of people charge their phones when they get down to a certain percentage, or simply when it’s convenient.

A lot of you are still charging your phone all night, every night. 35.16% of voters plug their phones in before they go to bed. If you’re one of those people and are concerned about battery degradation, I’d urge you to read Rob’s explainer on the subject here. It’s very informative!

Nearly 15% of voters said they only charge their phone when it’s nearly out of battery, while a measly 0.32% only charge their phone when it completely shuts off.

Don’t miss: The Best of Android: Mid-2020 — Which phone has the best battery life?

Here’s what you had to say

Here are some of the best comments from last week’s poll explaining why they voted the way that they did:

• Djanta: I charge my phone when the battery gets to 20% and I try my best to not let it get over 90%.
  I’ve adopted that routine ever since I got my Mate 10 Pro two years ago and I always get 6-7 hours of Screen-On Time with Mobile Data always on.
• Dylans Ong: I charge my phone before I sleep.make she it’s 100%.
  When I wake up, I charge it to 100% before I go to work.
• Aasif Jawaid: I try to keep battery between 50-80% no matter how many times I have to charge the device.
• Tim Dodd: I top up to 80% whenever it’s convenient and seldom let it drop below 20%. I will only very rarely run it till empty or fill it full other than to recalibrate the battery management every couple of months or so. I take the same approach to my Garmin Fenix watches and, where the technology allows, my laptops and tablets.Also, I have disabled fast charging and I do not use wireless charging. Today’s phones (S10+ 1TB for me) are too expensive and too powerful to just throw on the scrap heap prematurely due to bad or lazy charging practices. If I had an EV (my next vehicle) I’d treat it the same way.
• anirudh: I will charge in the morning when I wake up, It will charge max 80 -100 when my stuff completed and goto work
• Jason Chu: Morning when I wake up. Takes about 1 hour and 30 minutes when I have about 20% to 30% (at about 15% no more than 2 hours. I can go about 48 hours in between charging. Samsung s9 about 20 months old.
• White Razor: Overnight, every night. It’s awful, but I don’t want to think about it during the day.Pixel 2 XL; never had an issue with the battery thankfully. I think for the most part it doesn’t matter what model your phone is… you got to be lucky to have minimal issues. I keep seeing mixed thoughts about too many models
• Louie Cafarella: I charge my phone to 100% right before I go to bed. Then I unplug it. Then on my way to work I top it off. Start the work day at 100%. I have the S20 Ultra, the battery on this thing is a beast.
• Andrew Zuo: I charge my phone while I’m using my computer using a USB cable plugged into it. It’s very slow, but it works. Plus this way I can easily tether because Windows WIFI is terrible. Also my custom ROM has a feature where it’ll automatically stop charging when it reaches 80%.
• mas: Any time during the day. My charging rule is less than 40%- 96%. Redmi k20

That’s it for this week. As always, thanks for voting, thanks for the comments, and don’t forget to let us know what you thought of the results below.