Slow charging is holding us back: A call to Apple, Samsung, and Google

If someone had told me ten years ago that in 2024 we’d still be stuck waiting that long for a full charge, I wouldn’t have believed it. Surely, a decade of technological advancements should have solved the problem, right?

Apple, Samsung, and Google seem notoriously slow to adapt to the new times, especially when it comes to charging. Once, their flagships were met with a 'Hell, yeah!' Nowadays, it's usually an 'Oh, no!'

Most other manufacturers, especially the multitude of China-based manufacturers have solved the charging "problem" a long time ago. These brands are not just playing catch-up; they’re setting the pace for the industry.

Most Android flagships coming from OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, or Huawei these days supports extremely fast wired charging. Some start at 100W, but often way more than that. Vivo has a few devices that can get charged at 200W. Xiaomi's Redmi has unveiled a 300W charging solution, while Realme, a subsidiary of Oppo, has recently announced plans for a blazing-fast 320W charging. 

Extraordinary. 

  

Just the other day, for example, the Xiaomi 14T Pro walked into our office for a full review, and one of the first benchmarks that we ran was the wired charging. The latest Xiaomi flagship supports 120W wired charge and 50W wireless charging, pretty tame in comparison with the numbers shared just a few sentences above, but still way ahead of your regular Pixel, iPhone, or Galaxy.  

Well, we got the Xiaomi 14T Pro fully juiced up from 0% to 100% in just 23 minutes (Xiaomi advertises 19 minutes), which is an exceptionally quick result!

It is, however, not a record in our books. In fact, we have three Android phones tied for the first place in our charging benchmarks, all juicing up in 23 minutes: this here Xiaomi 14T Pro, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, and the OnePlus 10T. 

The second place is also contested: both the Xiaomi Note 12 Pro+ and the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra charge in 24 minutes as per our tests. At the third spot, we have the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro+ 5G, scoring 25 minutes in the 0% to 100% exercise. There's a lot more potent Android champs that get fully charged below 30 minutes––check the PhoneArena Battery Test Results page. 

Notice anything? Yep, no Samsung, no Apple, no Google.

In fact, the fastest charging Samsung phone is near the middle of our table––the Galaxy S20 Ultra charges in 59 minutes, which sounds slow in comparison with the mind-bogglingly fast charging times that battle it out at the top of the rankings. 

Google is also an "offender"––its fastest-charging device is the Pixel 9 Pro XL, which gets fully juiced up in one hour and 21 minutes. Older Pixels are even slower. 

With Apple, the fastest-charging phone we've ever benchmarked is the iPhone 14, which gets fully charged in, wait for it, one hour and 28 minutes, a whole eternity. In fact, you can fully juice up the three fastest charging phones back to back one after the other and still have more than twenty minutes left for this particular iPhone to reach 100%. And that's the best-performing one––all other iPhones take even longer.

It's not us, the regular Joe's and plain Jane's, that have caved in and "accepted" that Samsung, Google, and Apple phones simply refuse to let their devices charge truly fast and routinely lose the race to just about any Chinese smartphone out there in terms of fast charging. 

And indeed: the Galaxy S24 Ultra charges at 45W, the Pixel 9 Pro XL can receive up to 37W with some specific hardware, while the latest iPhones can jump to around 40W in some specific circumstances. 

The most often cited and widely accepted reason for the slow charging is battery health. Fast charging at high wattage generates heat, and heat is the natural predator of your phone's battery. This thermal stress leads to faster degradation of the battery’s internal components, reducing its capacity to hold a charge and shortening its lifespan.

Manufacturers have tried to address that. Years ago, OnePlus redesigned how its charging tech managed heat. Instead of increasing the voltage, which would result in more heat buildup within the phone, they increased the amperage while keeping the voltage steady. 

This approach, initially introduced with Dash Charge, directed more heat to the charger itself rather than the phone's battery, keeping it cooler during the charging process. This method showcased that fast charging and battery preservation don’t have to be mutually exclusive, as long as heat is handled effectively. 

Or, as user buttersauce said on Reddit six years ago, "Most quick charges are like filling a bucket faster by increasing water pressure from the hose, while Dash Charge uses a bigger hose". What an apt description!