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Comment by thanksgiving | Hacker News Reader

> I keep my iPhone at home, powered and connected to the Internet but don't use it as a daily driver.

I recently learned that the Google pixel 8 and 9 will soon get a feature that will allow these phones to remain plugged in and turned on without charging and discharging the battery (under certain circumstances).

I really wish this was widely available for all cell phones and tablets. I know new iPhones have a limit charging to 80% option (my iPhone se 2020 does not) but I think the next step is to add this? My main motivation is to do whatever we can to avoid spicy pillow problem in batteries.

Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

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I keep it switched ON, but not always powered because of the fear of spicy pillow; I used an iPad as seconday monitor and ended up with a spicy pillow & destroyed the device with my self-repair attempt.

When I faced a similar dilemma before the smartphones implemented 80% cut off, I was planning a automated smart power strip which cuts down power to charger when the battery reaches 80%; not sure if iOS battery api is accessible though.

Shout to AccA, which helped me limit the battery to 80% on Android before it was implemented within the OS.

[1] https://github.com/MatteCarra/AccA

Samsung at some point a few years ago added the ability to cap charging below the maximum (was 85% until an update this year dropped it to 80%). Settings, Battery, Battery Protection. I believe this roughly corresponded to their extension of providing OS or security updates for 5 years.

iPhones have this capability as demonstrated by their "Optimized battery charging" that caps at 80% overnight "then finishes charging before you normally pick up your phone" or some crap like that, BUT they only let you set an actual cap on the charge level on the 16 (and 15?) even though older models should have the same capability. Yes, this picture you can't see is me flipping Apple the bird while holding my 14 Pro that's down to 87% of original capacity because I can't cap the charge.

Confused by "spicy pillow problem", but I assume you're referring the classic Li-ion BULGE. Im not sure there is any way to protect it in a 24/7 uptime situation outside of a fully removable battery.... Which now has me wondering if the new pixels can run fully disconnected from their battery, like early LG android models.

That's what I understood. I don't own a pixel so I am not sure.

Here is a reddit thread on this topic

https://old.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1hcfv54/your_p...

They can have circuitry that bypasses the battery.

chargie is one solution for platforms where support is available

https://chargie.org/

I don't think charge can do what I'm asking which is to bypass the battery and run the phone directly off the wall. I am ok if the phone reboots when the power is disrupted. On a computer, we have this setting called last known state, right? Like if the phone was on when the power was disrupted, turn it on again without using the battery when power is restored.

Basically, I want the phone to ignore that there is a battery until the battery charge drops to about 20 percent and then charge to to about 60 or 80 percent but don't use the battery at all. Only use the battery as a power source if the user switches off this dedicated mode or if the user powers on the device without external power present. Something like that.

> I want the phone to ignore that there is a battery until the battery charge drops

Librem 5 has this functionality: https://forums.puri.sm/t/how-to-limit-battery-charge-voltage...

Some retro handheld devices (Ayn Odin 2 is the one I know for sure because I have it) have that feature.

Caveat though. Reports of spicy pillows are increasing as the age of the device gets closer to more than a year. They may or may not be using that feature.

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