Adaptive Charging may be adapting itself to Pixel users without alarms

This isn’t the first story we’ve had this weekend about Adaptive Charging on Google’s Pixel phones, but this is the first major change to this battery-preserving feature we’ve heard about in a long, long time. It’s a feature that’s meant to prevent phones from achieving a full charge until shortly before an alarm is set to go off. But those who didn’t set an alarm between 3 and 10 AM or one at all haven’t been able to take advantage of Adaptive Charging. That may soon change, though.

9to5Google‘s Abner Li found that his Pixel 7 had started notifying him that Adaptive Charging was turned on and that the battery would be full by 7 AM.

Notably, he did not have an alarm set on the device, which is the current prerequisite to turning the feature on as described by this Pixel Phone Help page:

Important: When you charge your phone between 9 PM and 4 AM with an active alarm set for 3–10 AM, your phone may use Adaptive charging. This feature must be turned on for your phone to use it. Learn how to set an alarm.

At its launch with the December 2020 Feature Drop, the “Adaptive charging” toggle in the Pixel system settings featured this subheading:

Charge steadily overnight to preserve long-term battery life. Uses alarm to completely charge by wakeup.

A recent check of the same toggle today shows that the subheading now features this somewhat vague passage:

Extend battery lifespan by charging steadily during longer charging periods. Activated based on your usage cycle.

That sounds like Adaptive Charging may not need to wait until nightfall in order for it to work. But as one Redditor who also seems to be feeling through these changes says, there still doesn’t seem to be any manual time settings for the feature — frustrating to some, for sure.It’s not exactly clear if this silent change happened to come along with the March Pixel Feature Drop or if it’s been distributed through other means. We’ve reached out to Google for more information and hope to update this story if we hear back.

Thanks: Armando