Is it a psychological thing like how time seems to move faster when you’re late? Or is my phone lying to me?
In: 28
Well, your phone is lying to you (by some definitions) but it might be kinder to say your phone is guessing without telling you how confident it is in those guesses.
Battery percentage does not linearly mean anything measurable on the battery. Your phone can measure the battery’s current voltage, but that relates to how much time is left in a non linear shape (image search for ‘battery voltage over time’ will get you some nice graphs). If the shape was the same every time it would still be possible to calculate time based on voltage, but it’s not, so the phone needs to guess where it is most likely to be based on phone use, battery lifespan, and engineering tests from the phone designers. Even the 100% and 0% are really just points that the engineers have decided is good enough boundaries, rather then the physical limit (which is why 0% phones can still turn on long enough to tell you to plug them in).
Specifically the last 20%, I suspect there’s a decent amount of psychological bias affecting you, but it might be based on something as well. Most phones go into a low consumption mode to extend that last chunk of time, but if the programmers of this mode don’t anticipate how you use the phone it might have the opposite effect; I’d guess this would be the biggest factor.
Also, if you looked up those graphs, you can see that the voltage quickly falls after a certain point in time; the speed of this fall varies the most between charges and over time. It can make predictions less precise, to the point that the phone guesses it’s at 15% when it’s really at 10%.
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