A new trend I'm observing with phones nowadays is a massive marketing focus on Fast Charging. There's constant one-upping with new phones when it comes to their charging abilities. If one comes out with 30W charging, the next one comes out with 35W charging, and the one after that 45W charging.
The reality is that while fast charging is excellent and can be very helpful when you need to charge up your phone in a pinch, it's sadly not good for the health of your battery. Consistent fast charging it higher wattage speeds will damage to your batteries health. However, the true issue with one-upping charging speeds is that almost EVERY SINGLE one of these charging solutions is proprietary. You ABSOLUTELY NEED to use the cable and charger provided by the manufacturer to achieve the results they advertise. I'm not kidding, even if you use another USB Cable with some of these chargers, you won't be able to fast charge. If you use charger that wasn't supplied by the OEM, you're often left with severely reduced charging speeds. The interesting thing is that, in the past Android phones all followed ONE SINGLE standard for charging. Which was known as Qualcomm's Quick Charge. You could use any Qualcomm Charger with any phone and you'd get the same fast charging results. This made life very simple. Almost any charger you used could fast charge your Android phone, since they all supported the same standard. The reality is very different today. Even though all the phones use the same port, the USB-C port, the charging standards on all these phones are very different. This means that if I used a OnePlus Warp charger on my Oppo phone, it wouldn't fast charge. This basically happens with every phone now. Every brand has their own charging solution, which is unfortunately proprietary. Another downfall of having a proprietary charger is that if you lose your charger or cable, you HAVE to replace it with one from the manufacturer if you want to retain the fast charging capabilities. To show you the best example, I compared my OnePlus Nord by charging it from 1% up to 100% using two chargers. The first one was the Warp Charge 30T that comes in the box with the phone. This charger is capable of 30W fast charging. The second charger I used was an Anker USB PD (Power Delivery) 30W fast charger. USB PD is the closest we have to a standard similar to Qualcomm Quick Charge from back in the day. This charger has the same 30W charging capability when used with a devices that support USB PD such as iPhones, Google Pixels, MacBooks, etc. The results of this test are just quite frankly astonishing, the OnePlus Nord charged from 1%-100% in: Warp Charge 30T - 55 minutes
USB PD 30W - 96 minutes
The massive delta between the two is disappointing to see. It ultimately forces you to use the OnePlus provided charger. This isn't special to OnePlus this has become the issue with almost every Android manufacturer. In fact, it's weird that Apple of all companies has a more open standard (USB PD) for fast charging compared to Android phones. I do acknowledge that getting these faster charging speeds while maintaining a standard isn't realistic, however the issue stems from the fact that we've hit the pointing of diminishing returns with charging speeds. Companies are currently working on chargers that go up to 125W. In reality anything more than 40-50W is not really necessary to charge up the 4000-5000 mAh batteries on a phone. Using these higher charging speeds in my opinion does nothing but cause long term damage to the battery. I would much rather take a standardized 20-30W charging solution that optimizes speed and battery health simultaneously. Almost every new phone comes with a large enough battery to last a day, the need for crazy fast charging speeds just isn't there. Most people charge their phones overnight anyways where even 5W charging is enough since the phone is connected for hours. It's weird to see Android companies be more like Apple and Apple be more like Android companies with their stance of charging standards. Android OEM's really need to cut this shit out. We don't need faster chargers, we need more standardized charging solutions and a focus on making batteries last longer both charge-wise and health-wise. I don't mind if you can fast charge your phone up to 125W, but if ONLY your charger can get those speeds and every other charger is stuck on way slower speeds, it honestly starts to work against the consumers after a certain point. My stance here is that if you want to have insane charging speeds that are proprietary, that is fine. However, you NEED to have a standard in place as well set at something like 20-30W. -Ankit