Available on the Pixel 4, 4 XL, Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 5, adaptive charging kicks in automatically when you plug in your phone to charge overnight. However, it has a couple of requirements. Firstly, your phone has to start charging after 9 PM. You also must set an alarm for between 5-10 AM. If you meet these requirements, your phone charges at the normal speed (supported fast charging speed) overnight till the battery reaches 80 percent. The charging speed then slows down to preserve battery health. However, there have been many reports of the device getting fully charged several hours before the user woke up to the set alarm. The adaptive charging wasn’t quite adapting to users’ habits. Perhaps Google was being a bit cautious to avoid leaving the devices not charged fully when the user wakes up. Of course, waking up to a phone that isn’t fully charged when you’ve set it to charge overnight wouldn’t be the best experience for users. But Google seems to have garnered enough usage data and feedback from users since it launched adaptive charging. The feature now reportedly works much more efficiently.
Google has significantly improved its adaptive charging feature
Multiple users have reported on Reddit that their Pixel devices are now reaching 100 percent battery much closer to their set alarm time than before. Specifically, the devices are getting fully charged 30 to 90 minutes before their alarms go off in the morning. They are now charging much slower after reaching the 80 percent mark. It’s unclear when Google rolled out this improved adaptive charging to its compatible Pixel phones. It is working for many users on Android 12 Beta 4. But there’s every possibility that it was around in earlier builds as well. People mostly don’t check when their device reached 100 percent battery as long as they have 100 percent battery when they wake up. So it could easily go unnoticed. Nonetheless, if you have a compatible Pixel phone running on Android 12, you can check if this improved adaptive charging is available to you. Navigate to Settings > Battery > Battery Usage to see when your device reached 100 percent battery.
