Why Google is preparing an option limiting the load to 80%

The Mountain View giant is reportedly working on a new battery charge optimization feature for Android. This would allow you to manually limit your battery to 80%, which could help preserve this essential component of a smartphone for longer.

The Pixel 9 will soon be making their appearance, and with them, Android 15. This new version of Google’s OS should bring many new features and improvements that we already know for the most part, although there remains an element of mystery. As proof: our colleagues fromAndroid Authority have found a new option in Android 15 Beta 4.

Digging through some unused lines of code, they discovered descriptions of a feature that allows you to manually limit a smartphone’s battery charge to 80%. If this sounds familiar, it should: Google Pixel and any other smartphone already offer this type of option, but they go further by analyzing user habits to bring the charge to 100% at times when the phone is most often unplugged.

With this new feature, the idea would be to sacrifice a little autonomy to preserve the battery longer. Indeed, if the adaptive charging options already have a positive impact on the latter, limiting the charge to 80% remains more effective, and therefore remains preferable in the long term. Moreover, Google is not a novice in this area, since its Pixel tablets automatically restrict the charge between 70 and 80% when they remain plugged in for a long time.

A gradual deployment in sight?

This feature should be accessible from the Android 15 settings, in the battery section, alongside the already existing optimization options. It would then be possible to choose between adaptive charging, or to limit the recharge to 80%. However, the screenshots obtained by Android Authority may not reflect the final rendering of this new feature, once it is available to all users. It remains to be seen, for example, whether it will be possible to choose a different percentage, as in iOS 18.

Furthermore, although these lines of code are appearing in the beta version of Android 15, there is no guarantee that they will be used when the next version of the OS is officially launched. We may have to wait a few more months before this is the case, during a future update.