As part of the December Pixel Feature Drop, Google announced a new feature for select Pixel phones, called Adaptive Charging. The idea of adaptive loading was to offer a solution that could help take care of your battery charging it continuously for a long period of time, instead of quickly.
I’m not sure if there was much confusion about how Adaptive Charging would work (we assume it worked at night and slowly charged a phone), but a Google support page for the feature shows you exactly when your Pixel 4, Pixel 4a, or Pixel 5 will try to trigger it.
To use the new battery charging feature, you will first need to activate it (Settings> Battery> Adaptive battery). Once this is done, your phone will search for two things: 1) that you start charging your phone after 9:00 pm and; 2) an active alarm is set between 5-10AM. If you don’t answer all of that, Google says, “Otherwise, your phone charges normally.”
Obviously, this is not incredible for those with alternative schedules or who do not use alarms. If you work at night and sleep during the day or plan to wake up before 5 am, adaptive charging will apparently never be activated. I’m the type to rarely set an alarm, so I never seem to benefit from it and I won’t be able to take care of my battery.
It’s strange why Google can’t use all the sophisticated AI that they never stop to predict when their sleep schedule is or that their battery is running low and can stay on the charger for a long time to trigger Adaptive Charging. Hell, even a manual toggle button would be nice to have instead of this limited schedule.
// 9to5Google