You can remember a time when it didn’t take all night to charge your phone. Back in those golden days, your Android’s battery meter went from a strip of red to a fat green bar in a quarter of an hour. Nowadays, however, your poor phone takes hours to recharge and you’re constantly scrambling from one charge session to the next. Or maybe your phone has always been a snail-paced charger, constantly left in the dust by your friends’ devices.
Whatever your experience, it’s time to finally put your smartphone under a diagnostic microscope and get to the root of its slow-charging issue. Odds are your phone is suffering from one of these ten ailments, and we’re going to show you how to fix it if possible.
We’re going to tackle these roughly in order of decreasing likelihood, so let’s start with the most common culprit.
5 reasons why your Android battery is charging slowly
- The Enemy Is You
- Background apps sapping your battery
- You have a bad cable
- You have a bad battery
- Your USB port is damaged
The Enemy Is You
Take a look in the mirror, because it’s time for some introspection. How addicted to Facebook are you? Do you have a Candy Crush Saga problem? Do you habitually play with your phone while it’s charging?
A surprising number of smartphone users aren’t aware that the biggest drain on their phone’s battery is the screen. Keeping that gorgeous display lit up with high-resolution YouTube drama will use up the battery even as your phone is charging up. If you combine this with one of the other problems above, you might find yourself in a situation where you are using battery power faster than your phone can take it in.
If you need your phone to charge quickly, give it a rest while it’s on the charger.
Background apps sapping your battery
Although your screen is the number one battery sucker, you might have some sneaky apps running in the background that are constantly draining power, causing your phone to charge slower. In addition to charging sluggishly, does your phone also feel like it runs through its battery life faster than it used to? If so, this may be your issue.
The easiest solution here is to grab a good task manager and check it frequently to see what’s running when it shouldn’t be. When you locate a misbehaving app, try uninstalling it and see if your battery life and charge speed is improved over the next few days.
You have a bad cable
If your phone is charging slowly, checking the USB cable should always be your first step. It’s actually pretty understandable once you consider all the wear and tear your basic USB cable goes through in the course of everyday use. Many people keep using the same charger setup that came with their device for years, unaware that USB cables tend to get beat up pretty easily.
USB cables are dropped, bent, stepped on and plugged in and out of devices on a daily basis. One thing to keep in mind is that USB cables are designed to be less robust than your device’s port.
Ever have one of those cables that didn’t seem to “stick” in the phone anymore? It just frustratingly falls out for no reason? Take a look inside the front end of the connector. You’ll find several tiny prongs made of relatively soft metal. You’ll want to make sure these aren’t bent or damaged as they can cause damage to your handset.
Most of the time, it's the USB cable's fault
In short, lots can go wrong with your USB cable and they are mostly manufactured to be weak. Grab a new USB cable, and you should be good to go. This and this alone probably constitutes 90 percent of slow-charging problems.
You have a bad battery
Most of the time, batteries just get old and become bad or sometimes your phone just came with a bad battery. There have been many instances of manufacturers issuing recalls for whole batches of batteries. Search online to see if your phone’s model came with a bad battery, and see if you can acquire a replacement from your provider.
Unfortunately, most modern smartphones no longer offer user-replaceable batteries. This means that if the cells start to die in your device, you’re either going to have to crack open the handset or you’re going to have to get rid of the handset and get a new one.
Your USB port is damaged
This is what we were hoping it wasn’t. If you’ve made it this far, and your phone still isn’t charging correctly, then you may have broken or bent a pin inside your phone’s USB port. At this point, you should really consider taking your phone to a professional for repair. If you have a warranty from your handset provider, then you may be able to get this issue repaired for cheap or free.
I think this just covers a few of it. If you’re getting a slow charge, I hope you found the solution you needed on this list.
Did we miss anything? Have you experienced any problems with crappy charging that don’t appear on this list? Got a better solution to one of the problems listed above? Let us know!
Source: Android Authority
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