Samsung and Apple both released new phones this year that let you enable a setting where it prevents you from charging your phone’s battery beyond 80% to improve its lifespan. How does this work?
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Think about the battery as of several balloons you store energy in. You can pump it almost full and deflate thousand times and it will be ok.
You can also pump it up until the balloons almost bursts, that way you can store a bit more in there. But when you deflate the balloon it will be stretched. After hounded cycles some of them will be so stretched that they will finally burst. So as a result you will have less and less capacity.
This is almost exactly what happens when you try to charge a battery until it is 100% full – the insides of the battery get heated, some parts inside change volume, some gas is released. This all bends and stresses internal structure of the battery until small pieces break. This decreases capacity.
It is know effect for many years, so batteries were never charged to the 100% full level, but to a level where they can survive being charged and discharged many times.
But as people wanted the batteries to last longer and longer. But there was no new miracle technology to do so. Either the batteries could be made bigger and heavier or they could be charged a bit more, halving their lifespan. So this overcharging become a standard since people change the phones so often that the battery being damaged was not an issue. it was even better for manufacturer because they could both brag about the time device works on a singe charge and have the users replace the device sooner because battery would go bad.
Now, phones are so expensive so the people don’t want to change them so often, so you have an option to trade some battery capacity for a better battery lifespan.
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