Google Will Reduce the Battery Capacity of the Pixel 9a, and There’s Nothing You Can Do About It
Google is planning to release a new update for its upcoming Pixel 9a , which includes a new feature designed to protect and extend the phone’s battery life. While longevity is the goal, this new battery management feature will reduce the Pixel 9a’s battery capacity over time. It won’t just be the Pixel 9a: other Pixel phones will eventually get this feature. However, the most interesting thing is that Pixel 9a users cannot disable this feature.
Why do lithium-ion batteries need management?
All lithium-ion batteries wear out over time. As you use your smartphone and continue to charge it, the total battery capacity decreases. After all, charging your phone to 100% doesn’t take as long as it used to: perhaps charging your phone 100% today actually gives you 80% of the battery capacity it had when it was new.
Manufacturers have come up with workarounds that help delay the inevitable by limiting the actual charging rate of the battery. Apple has an iPhone feature that allows users to limit the battery charge between 80% and 95% . There are apps that do this for Mac too .
These measures really go a long way in extending the battery life of your device. In the short term, you may not notice any difference, but these changes can result in batteries lasting months or years longer than before. Now that Google supports Pixel devices with software updates for seven years , it’s in the company’s best interest to ensure its devices’ batteries perform at a level that can support new software and features that will be added in the coming years.
How Google Battery Health Assistance works
As first reported by 9to5Google , Google is adding a new Battery Help feature to Pixel phones starting with the Pixel 9a. Google is taking a completely different path than Apple: Instead of providing the option to limit battery charging overnight or to a certain percentage, Google will begin reducing the maximum battery voltage after the Pixel 9a has completed 200 charge cycles.
A charging cycle does not mean one charging session. This means your phone charges from zero to 100%, even if it happens intermittently over several days. If your phone drops from 100% to 60%, then you charge it again to 100%, that’s 40% of the full charge cycle. If you then let it drop to 40% and charge it back up to 100%, that’s 60% of the cycle – adding up to one full cycle. So, as soon as the system completes 200 such cycles, the battery recovery assistant will work.
Google will do this automatically and in the background, hopefully without being too intrusive. Google says users may notice a slight decrease in battery life as the battery ages and will continue to reduce the voltage over 1,000 charge cycles.
Once this feature becomes available on existing Pixel devices, you’ll be able to turn it off if you want, with one exception.
Mandatory battery care assistance
As I mentioned above, the Pixel 9a is currently the only Google smartphone that will not have a switch for the Battery Health Assistance feature. While this is a nice feature that will extend the life of your smartphone’s battery, not having the option to turn it off and therefore not having the choice of whether to use the phone’s full charging capacity is a bummer. Since the Pixel 9a has the largest battery of any Pixel phone (5100mAh), your phone’s battery should remain in good shape for a while. But the fact that Google is pushing this feature on its users rather than presenting it as a choice will likely make things difficult for Pixel 9a users, especially since other Pixel users will have a choice in the matter.
At the time of writing, I don’t know how this feature will work or how it will be disabled, but I suspect it will go hand in hand with the new Battery Health section in the upcoming Android 16, which allows users to limit charging capacity to 80%, shows the number of battery cycles, as well as other battery-related data.
This, and the fact that the Pixel 9a will lack top-tier AI features , sets it apart from the Pixel 9 (which can be found on sale for as little as $600 ). Perhaps the latter option will suit users who want to gain as much control over their device as possible.