We live in a world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which has taken “homework” to a whole new meaning, and yet Google seems to think that we all live, work and sleep at the same hours. At least, that’s what your Adaptive Charging Pixel smartphones seem to think. This probably needs to change.
Adaptive charging came with the fall of features in December, allowing Pixel 4 or newer smartphones to charge slowly when sleeping and recharge before the alarm sounds. As batteries wear out more quickly when they are kept close to 100% for long periods, this policy is intended to help preserve their useful life and has been implemented in many other phones.
But, as previously pointed out by our competing friends in the publication ironically called 9to5Google, Google works on a set schedule. According to the feature help article on the Pixel phone help pages:
When you charge your phone after 9:00 pm, with an active alarm set to 5–10, your phone uses adaptive charging. Otherwise, your phone charges normally.
Of course, not everyone has such a cemented schedule – third shift workers, shift covers and those who need to travel early, we feel you – and it’s a shame that Google hasn’t created a manual exception to that schedule or even a trick, such as linking it to a Google Assistant bedtime request.
Image: 9to5Google
It is even worse when this policy does not appear directly on the settings page.
So if you are careful and conservative about how you tax your consumables, but wake up at 5:00 pm instead of 5:00 am, the adaptive charge will not adapt to you.
