TL;DR
- Android 15 is preparing to tweak the threshold that determines whether a charger is seen as fast, from a measly 7.5W to a more reasonable 20W.
- The operating system has long considered any charging speeds of at least 7.5W to be fast, which is far, far below what actual fast chargers can deliver nowadays.
- The change isn’t live yet in the latest Android 15 beta, though, so chargers that deliver 7.5W of power will still be seen as fast on Pixels.
Why not just show the charging W on the screen instead of ‘fast’.
Because the less tech savvy people will be confused when the battery starts getting full and charging speed tapers off which will lead to complaints about their 20w charger only providing 3w of power.
Then give a setting to enable it in the developer settings.
Android is catering to the general public. The average user would easily understand fast, slow and normal. 20w, 68w, 5w not so much. But, I agree not having to use apps or 3rd party cables just to see the charging watts would be great. Even a Dev flag to enable the feature would be cool.
That’s ridiculous. People have been buying light bulbs based on Watts for around a century and understand that higher W means brighter and more power.
Bad example. People are still confused with light bulbs. That’s why they still say the equivalent wattage to incandescent bulbs.
Bigger number go faster
You make it sound like a joke but that’s literally all it takes here.
Fast, normal, and slow are not clear either, I think. We see here that the “fast” term needs to evolve because it probably feels pretty slow now. Wattages are pretty clear reference points when users come to understand what they mean, especially over time.
Expecting the average user to understand numbers is a high expectation
You could just show it as a percentage of max its trying to draw be default and show actual watts under a developer toggle
Seriously. This thought occurred to me the other day when I plugged my power bank into a car’s charging port to check the wattage and wondered “why the fuck can’t my phone just do this by default?” Do we actually not trust people to understand higher number = faster?
Charging… the car?
I think they meant they plugged the battery bank into the car’s phone charger?
How does that tell them the wattage output of the power bank
Maybe they have a wattage reader on their charger/power bank/car?
I assume they meant check the wattage of the car charger output. some powerbanks have displays now and can show you it’s input or output.
… All phones also have displays and should show you the same thing but don’t.
Many custom roms do that
below 5W, then the charger is considered “slow,” and the message “charging slowly” is shown on the lock screen. If the power is above 7.5W, then it’s considered “fast,” and the “charging rapidly” message is shown instead. If the power is between 5 and 7.5W, then the charger is seen as “normal,” and the lock screen simply says the phone is “charging.”
Seems to be a purely cosmetic change. I was wondering if the OS has any different behavior when charging quickly (like being more aggressive with running background processes, and running updates/backups) but the article didn’t say anything about that.
If my phone was only charging at 5 or 6W I’d want to know the charger is garage. That might not even be enough to use the phone without losing battery. What they really need is to rename “slow” to “very slow”, and then 5W to 7.5W could be considered the new “slow”. The intent being that “very slow” is problematically slow (maybe the OS scheduler could pretend the phone is not charging). And “slow” charging would just be for mild inconvenience.
If only the phone could just tell me the actual number of watts it’s charging at lol. Even if it’s rounded and averaged.
iirc, there are currently 3 charging states: Fast, Slow, and Low Power Charger, which already covers your cases, so I would argue just moving the bar between low and high up is probably enough.
then I wonder what the cutoff is for “low power charger” because I don’t think I’ve ever seen that, it could probably stand to be increased a bit
I’ve only ever seen it when running a game or when a chromebook got plugged into a 5w charger, so I’m guessing it’s when the OS does the math and decides it can’t rev down enough to make headway while booted up.
It’s also possible to have voltage issues on a device with multi-cell batteries.
My laptop charges on a type-C charger, but only if it can get 15+ volts. If it’s a 12V charger, that isn’t enough to push a charge into its battery. It will run on 12V but won’t charge at all, even if it’s off.
I’m curious as to what effect this might have on people who will now be charging at “slow” speeds, is all it going to do is trigger different Power saver settings?
Its purely a visual change to signal charging speeds to our eyes. There are no changes to power savings yet.
Thanks!
