After a long gaming session on your smartphone, you finally decide to give it a rest and put your phone on charge. After a few hours, when you check your phone’s battery status, it’s shocking to find the battery depleted. There’s no need to panic. This guide will provide 10 solutions to fix the issue of your phone’s battery draining while charging.
Table of Contents
Why Is Phone’s Battery Decreasing While Charging
Before you proceed to the troubleshooting process, it’s important to understand what causes your phone’s battery to drain while charging. Here are some common reasons:
- You are charging through the PC or laptop’s USB port. Since the power output is much lower than dedicated chargers, it can lead to battery drain if you perform resource-intensive tasks.
- A loose or damaged charging port can prevent a stable connection with the charger and cause unsteady charging or no charging at all.
- Using a damaged cable or charger.
- Using a third-party low-quality charger.
- Power supply issues with the wall outlet, or the charger’s pins may not fit properly.
- A poorly optimized operating system may lead to increased battery drain.
- A degraded or damaged battery.
Next, let’s focus on the troubleshooting methods.
1. Your Phone Is Overheating
If your phone gets too hot – because of the extremely hot weather, long gaming sessions, or engaging in other resource-intensive tasks while charging – your phone might stop charging. This could make you think the battery is decreasing while charging, but it’s actually just a safety feature to protect your phone.
We recommend that you avoid charging your phone while running resource-intensive tasks. This practice can help extend your battery’s lifespan and prevent potential charging issues in the future.
Also Read: Are you seeing the ‘charging on hold’ message on the screen? Learn what it means now.
2. Avoid Using Wireless Charging
Wireless charging tends to be slower than traditional wired charging methods. Furthermore, if you’re running resource-intensive apps or games, it might require more power than the wireless charger can provide. This can lead to the phone overheating and the wireless charger shutting down, potentially leading to battery drain while charging. Therefore, try charging your phone with a wired connection for a consistent power supply and prevent potential overheating.
3. Check Battery Usage Per App
You may have heard that poorly programmed apps are major culprits for draining the battery while running in the background. Although they might not drain the battery while charging, a degraded battery can still cause issues. To identify such apps, check your phone’s battery usage screen. Here’s how:
For Android:
Every Android phone brand has a distinct way of checking battery statistics. In the Settings app, use the Search button to locate the Battery Usage setting if you can’t find it.
- Go to Settings > Device Care > Battery.
- After that, tap on the View details button and select the date to see which applications used your phone’s battery.
- Based on their usage, select an app that you suspect may be causing background battery drain. For example, we’ve selected the Instagram app. As you can see it was running in the background more than the actual screen time.
- To prevent the app from running in the background, enable Background usage limits and put the app into a deep sleep. This might help you continue using the battery-consuming app without uninstalling it.
Also Read: Here’s how you can reduce 5G battery drain on Android and iPhone.
For iPhone:
- Open the Settings app and navigate to the Battery section.
- Scroll down and then tap on the Show Activity tab. This provides an overview of apps running in the background that may be causing battery drain while charging.
- If an app like YouTube is consuming a lot of battery, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh.
- Disable the YouTube app from running in the background. You can do the same for other apps you feel don’t need to run in the background.
4. Perform Battery Calibration
At times, your phone might display incorrect battery information due to glitches phone’s OS or the battery’s age. For instance, we encountered this issue with an old Samsung phone, which used to randomly shut down even when the battery displayed 15% to 25% remaining.
To avoid such inaccuracies, we recommend calibrating your phone’s battery. This ensures you receive accurate battery information while charging the phone. To do that, follow the below steps:
- Use your phone until it shuts down due to low battery.
- Next, turn your phone on to remove the remaining charge and let it turn itself off again.
- After that, charge your phone until it indicates 100% charged.
This action should resolve the incorrect battery indication issue on your smartphone.
5. Use a Fast Charging Adapter
If your phone supports fast charging and you’re still using a low-wattage adapter to charge it, you’re likely to encounter a battery-draining issue while charging. This is particularly noticeable when gaming. To avoid this, I would advise you to use a fast charger from the same brand, ensuring that your phone charges without draining the battery.
6. Update Phone
At times, charging issues may result from a bug in the phone’s operating system or due to a faulty software update, especially when using an early beta version of the OS. Consider checking for a software update on your iPhone or Android phone. If an update is available, install it as soon as possible. This step might help resolve the issue of the battery draining while charging.
Tips to Extend Battery Life and Prevent Future Charging Issues
- Don’t charge your phone beyond 80-90%, as it creates more heat and stresses the battery. The same applies when the battery drains to 0%. Additionally, avoid overnight charging, as keeping the battery at 100% for prolonged periods can strain it.
- Use the charger that came with your phone or one from a reputable brand.
- Avoid charging your phone in extremely hot or cold environments.
- Lower the screen brightness or enable adaptive brightness to save significant battery power.
- Keep your phone’s software up to date as manufacturers often release updates that improve battery performance.
- Avoid fast charging when possible. Use features like Battery Protection (Samsung) or Optimized Battery Charging (iPhone) to automatically adjust the charging speed.
- Keep your charging port free from dust and debris. You can use a soft brush to clean it.
- Use battery health monitoring apps to get detailed information about app usage and its impact on your phone’s battery.
- Avoid heavy tasks like gaming or video streaming while charging, as they can generate excessive heat.
Keeping Your Phone Alive While It Charges
We hope that one of the above solutions fixed the phone battery dropping while charging problem. If not, your battery or charging port may be permanently damaged. In such a case, visit the nearest mobile service center to replace your phone’s battery with an original one or change the charging port. This should probably fix the charging issue on your phone.
You can also fix a similar issue on your Windows laptop.
