Android 12 beta has unveiled many new features, including changes to the way it handles fast charging, such as throttling due to high temperatures. Thankfully, Android 12 beta 5 warns us about it.
First spotted in code by 9to5Google, Android 12 flashes a notification explaining that it needs to "limit charging to maintain battery health" when your phone starts getting too hot.
Heat and batteries do not go hand in hand, and the hotter your battery gets while charging, the worse it is for overall battery health. Poor battery health reduces capacity and shortens battery life over time.
So while you may want to charge your phone faster in certain situations, it may compromise the life of the phone. This is why the throttle feature was introduced in previous Android 12 beta versions.
The key difference here is that the phone will now alert you to what is happening. This feature also includes a "learn more" button that redirects to a support page about what the Pixel phone does when it starts to overheat.
Previous Android 12 builds introduced a feature that capped the charge at 80% if the phone was connected for an extended period of time. The general advice given to those wishing to prolong battery degradation is to keep the charge between 80% and 20%. Any more or less than that and there will be more lithium ions on one side of the battery, which will put more strain on the battery and cause it to degrade faster.
However, the details of how this throttled charging works are not entirely clear. The phone could continue to charge, albeit at a slower rate, or it could stop completely until the phone begins to cool down. It is also not clear whether the 80% limit would apply under these circumstances.
Hopefully, we should find out fairly soon; not only is the full release of Android 12 fairly close, but we are still experiencing summer temperatures. And with the overheating issues reported with the Google Pixel 5a, it is likely that more beta users will get this notice sooner rather than later.
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