The Pixels received the December feature drop recently. The feature in this drop is Adaptive Charging. The Google Pixel Adaptive Charging feature preserves batter health by controlling the speed at which your Pixel charges. This keeps your battery health optimal which will extend the overall life of your battery. However, it only works during certain hours as 9to5Google points out.
This feature works by steadily charging your device over a period of several hours. As a result of not charging your battery as quickly as possible, the battery’s health doesn’t get affected as much.
Now, it seems like charging over several hours would be a negative thing, but it works during hours when the device is not in use. Your Pixel will use Adaptive Charging at certain times. By only using this during certain times it ensures users aren’t affected negatively.
This feature is available for the Pixel 4 and 4XL, the Pixel 4a and Pixel 4a 5G, and the Pixel 5. The goal is to maintain the original capacity of your battery over time. This is extremely useful because consumers are not upgrading their devices as often as they used to.
The Google Pixel Adaptive Charging feature keeps your battery healthy
Now, this feature can be enabled or disabled in the settings. Users must go into Settings>Battery>Adaptive Battery>Adaptive Charging to enable or disable it. According to Google users need to do two things. Firstly, charge their device at night. Secondly, they must have an alarm set. This will ensure adaptive charging works.
Google’s support document gives some specifics for these two steps. The main thing is your phone has to start charging after 9:00 pm. As for the alarm it must be set to go off between 5:00 am-10:00 am.
When you charge your phone after 9:00 pm with an alarm set to go off between 5:00 am-10:00 am Adaptive Charging will kick in. Unfortunately, if neither of these is true then your phone will charge at its normal speed.
Now, the Pixel family getting this feature is great and should help keep users’ batteries chugging along for a long time. However, Adaptive Charging only working during a certain pre-determined time can be inconvenient.
The schedule Google has created will cover a large chunk of the users’ work schedules. Most people work a typical 9:00am-5:00pm job. This means a lot of people will get off, go home, eat, and then sleep sometime after 9:00 pm. But there are some users who will fall outside of the typical work schedule.
Those users may find themselves left out of the benefits provided by Adaptive Charging. Apple offers a similar feature, but its implementation learns from the user’s charging habits. This makes sure that a user’s phone is charged and ready to go according to the user’s schedule Hopefully, Google will tweak their implementation to work similarly to this in the future.