Android 15 might finally stop treating slow 7.5W chargers as fast

[phillynews215]

• Android 15 is preparing to tweak the threshold that determines whether a charger is seen as fast, from a measly 7.5W to a more reasonable 20W.
• The operating system has long considered any charging speeds of at least 7.5W to be fast, which is far, far below what actual fast chargers can deliver nowadays.
• The change isnt live yet in the latest Android 15 beta, though, so chargers that deliver 7.5W of power will still be seen as fast on Pixels.

The smartphone industry is incredibly competitive, so vendors need to pull out all the stops to convince people to buy their products. One way that smartphone makers try to make their products stand out from the pack is to increase how fast they charge. The fast charging arms race has reached a point where there are even some devices that can receive a ludicrous 240W of power from a charger. But without some sort of UI indicator, most users have no way of knowing how fast their phone is actually charging.

While Android does display a small message at the bottom of the lock screen when a fast charger is detected, the problem is that Android considers any charger that delivers at least 7.5W of power as “fast.” This makes it difficult to tell whether a given charger — say, a public charging station at an airport or a laptops USB port — is actually charging your phone rapidly. Fortunately, Google is finally looking to rectify this problem in the upcoming Android 15 update by tweaking the threshold that determines whether a charger is rated as fast.




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