After years of putting off upgrading my phone, I recently got a Pixel 6 Pro, and its adaptive charging feature is my new favorite thing.
Adaptive charging has been around since the Pixel 4 (though I didn’t know about it). Basically, at night, instead of charging straight to 100% battery, adaptive charging charges the phone normally up to a certain percentage and then slowly afterwards until it reaches 100% in the morning. Charging at this slower rate is easier on the battery, which can improve battery longevity.
There are a lot of opinions and Reddit posts about adaptive charging and Pixel charging rates but I don’t really care about the technical details right now. What I’m more interested in is how it’s changing the way I use my phone. Adaptive charging only works between certain late night hours, which means to take advantage of it, I generally need to be phone-free during that time. And lately, I have been.
This is a big deal. There are a lot of benefits to being phone-free when going to sleep — reduced screen time, improved sleep, etc. Unfortunately I have a tendency to stay up late, reading under the covers until my eyes burn. Not anymore though. Having the external motivator that adaptive charging offers — improved battery longevity — has worked wonders for me.
These kinds of side effects of software are interesting. It’s unlikely that Google developed adaptive charging with the intention of helping people go phone-free at night. Yet this feature is what stops me from scrolling endlessly when I should be sleeping. It’s a cool example of how technology designed to improve a product can also improve a person’s life.
In a world where we are increasingly glued to our phones and plugged into the internet, it’s refreshing to see software features that quietly encourage us to disconnect, even if it wasn’t intentional in the first place.
