Why is my Phone Charging Slow (11 Possible Reasons)
There was a time when it would take two hours to charge your phone. It wouldn’t talk literally all night for your phone to charge. Those awesome days. But now, everything has changed. Your phone would take all night to charge from 0% to 100%. You’re frustrated. But that’s understandable. Being a smartphone user, I’ve been through this many times. “Why is my phone charging so slow”, you must wonder.
11 Possible Reasons
Well, whatever the case is, we are going to take a deep look on the reasons for your smartphone to behave like that. It’s most likely possible that these 11 Possible Reasons have your problem included in. We are going to take every problem one by one and try to solve them. So let’s take it from scratch.
1. Cable’s Fault
A lot of people wonder, “Why is my phone charging so slow?” The first culprit is their own Data Cables. It pretty much understandable. People just don’t really care about their data cables. Therefore, no one cares how much these cables get bent or even torn sometimes.
I’ve literally seen people using their data cable unsheathed. It can exert current and be potentially harmful. Moreover, everyone tends to use the same set of charger that came with their devices for years. They wouldn’t replace it. The excuse they give is rather funny. People say, it’s the original charger. However, data cables are really weak.
Most of them won’t even some months. Therefore, cables can be easily beaten up. Moreover, people leave their data cables in their cars. Therefore, these data cables can be easily broken or get faulty. This is probably the reason why your phone charges very slowly.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, rather than pulling out data cable from the cable itself, you should push it from the very end where USB port is. Therefore, when we pull them from the cable, we tend to damage the data cables. In addition to all this, you can always replace the data cables.
Most of the time it’s data cable. Sometimes, the charger just won’t hold onto the phone. Ever pry opened it? The tiny little connectors of charger gets messed up. That’s the reason they just don’t hold on your phone. Therefore, they cannot provide the power at their full potential. In short, replacing data cable has a bright chance of fixing this problem.
There are many good data cables you can buy from Amazon and other shops.
2. Bad Adapter
At some times, even after replacing data cables, it won’t do any good. Moreover, people will change their phones or name it as “Faulty” phone without researching a bit more.
An adapter can be faulty. Adapter are like, home to your charging. It’s a blocky component of your charger and it can actually be messed up.
An Adapter takes the power and gives it to your phone using data wires. Therefore, maybe a power issue fried up adapter and now it doesn’t charge your phone with earlier potential anymore? Instead of blaming the company and phone for this issue, you should rather check you adapter out. This might remove you “Why my phone is charging slow” syndrome.
3. Phone Battery
There have been occasions where companies called their phones back for fixing batter issues. Remember Note 7? How many units exploded?. It became a threat on national level. Therefore, Samsung called their phones back. But not quite that, there can be many circumstances for your phone’s battery to become bad.
You should replace your phones battery by giving it to the company. Moreover, if you know how to open phones and replace batteries. You can order them online. There are many manufacturers providing their customers with the batteries. This is one of the reasons for phones to die fast.
In normal circumstances, phones just get older and their batteries go bad. It’s simple as that. Therefore, with the passage of time, batteries will eventually start to suffer. The only thing to avoid this issue is to replace as it’s the hardware fault.
4. Background Apps
Often times, we use apps but do not close it by killing them from the task manager. This results in the battery getting sucked pretty quickly. Therefore, with constantly drainage of battery, it becomes pretty difficult for poor charger to charge your smartphone.
If we look at the past, I remember the time when my Samsung phone was charging really slowly. I used to wonder why. Now, when I look back, I remember that I didn’t use to kill all the background apps. It all depends on you. In addition to slow charging, your battery might get emptied pretty quickly too.
In that case, the culprits are background apps. There are apps like, Facebook and Instagram. They are literally battery sucker. You don’t expect to have a pretty normal battery life with these apps running in the background.
In past, it was really aggressive. When messenger newly came out, my phone wouldn’t even last for 3 hours.
The easiest solution to this problem is regularly closing apps. You also have option in most of the phones to control these apps. For example, a task manager. Now a days, phones even tell you which app is sucking the most battery. So from there, you can easily detect and fix the app that sucks the most battery out of your smartphone.
5. Dusted USB Port
Just a couple of months ago, my devices wasn’t charging quickly. Therefore, I read some articles online and one of them said that it could be dust. After that, I recently got reminded by the dust I put my phone through. I never took care of cleaning it. Perhaps, I never even took a look at the charging port.
When you put your phone in pocket, it’s a high chance that dust or leftover or various dust is going to enter in your phone. Sometimes, there can be something on your USB port. Therefore, you won’t notice it when putting your phone to charge. So you might be wonder, how to fix this issue?
You should use a bright light. In addition to that, you can use a magnification glass in order to take a closer look in your USB port. Therefore, you have to clean it out of there. You need to grab all that dust out by using a thin material which can pull dust out of there. You should use something made of plastic. Never use toothpicks. I have used it and I personally ruined the USB port.
Therefore, I had to replace it afterwards too. In addition to that, toothbrushes are pretty effective too. They can grab all the dirt right outside the port. So this is how you can fix the charging problem of your phone.
6. Damaged USB Port
Before I start crying, let me clarify something. NEVER USE TOOTHPICKS TO PULL OUT THE DUST. I literally destroyed my phone’s USB port while trying to pull out the dust.
Sometimes there can be a broken piece of port stuck right inside of the port. This can make your phone useless or even charge slow sometimes.
At this point of damage, it’s recommended to send your phone to the company or repair it from someone professional. I made this mistake and literally had to wait for one week for the company to fix this issue. I’m glad that they actually did. So taking care of phone is pretty important.
7. Corroded USB Port
Living in humidity or being can cause a lot of problems. A lot of gym freaks end up corroding the USB ports. This results in slow charging or sometimes even faulting the whole USB port.
Corrosion is pretty dangerous for your phone. In addition to messing up the port, it can also eat your phone away. So always try not to put your phone in sweaty pockets. This issue is on a really small scale so definitely you don’t need to worry about it that much.
8. The User
Smartphones are kind of cool. You can do a lot of stuff with them like taking pictures, playing games and other stuff. In addition to that, they work with batteries. So please try to calm down.
This is for the heavy users. I am one of them. Watching reviews of different phones, I sued to think that the reviewer is just kidding. How can a phone last full day? Therefore, I researched a little bit and found out that it’s possible. As funny as it gets, not using phone can increase the battery.
The enemy might be you. If you’re expecting your phone to constantly run PUBG for like 10 hours, you might be wrong. A lot of people ignore the fact that their screen is the biggest battery drainer.
If you expect your phone to charge in one hour despite you watching content on 1080p crisp result. You should really research a little bit.
Using the phone heats up your phone and because of heating issues the battery can potentially drain. That is the reason why your phone might not charge that fast. Moreover, sometimes your phone starts to drain the battery while being on battery, That is the most frustrating case for me.
Therefore, you should not use your phone while charging it. Let it charge and consume whatever you want to.
9. Power Source
Sometimes the problem is your power source. Like when you attempt to charge the phone using a PC or Laptop, it will charge pretty slowly. Even with USB 3.0 the power output is just 0.9A.
Even when using wireless charging, you’ll will sense a dramatically decrease in the charge time. This is due to the fact that most of wall chargers utilize the whole power and provide a very powerful charge most of the times.
10. Old Phone
It’s a pretty long debate. Therefore I’ll keep it as short as possible. It might be possible that it’s time for you change and upgrade your smartphone. Now a days, most of newer phones have rapid charging and fast charging. But if you think nothing is working, then your phone is definitely really outdated.
Most people use the same phone for literally years. With the passage of time, technology improves. With the improve in technology all apps and games are getting advanced too. Therefore, the support for old phones become low too. Apps aren’t optimized for old phones anymore.
Imagine using Samsung Galaxy S3 in 2019. The phone is discontinued for a long time. The apps and game developer are not optimizing them. This increasing the use of RAM, Processing power and Battery use. These apps are potentially harmful for your phone.
This is how it works. The death of your phone is inevitable. Therefore, you might want to consider replacing your phone.
11. Software
Another culprit of battery not charging is the software. As you might know that, companies roll out their software updates. Therefore, phone is constantly updated at least every year. Moreover, it depends of company that how many years they will give these updates.
But what does it has to do with your phone charging slow? Software is something that uses hardware to manage and do various tasks. For example, if we take a look at Samsung’s touchwiz OS, a couple of years ago. It was just bloated with features and whole skin was too heavy. All this took toll on the phones performance and battery life ultimately.
That’s why most people used to flash custom ROMS on their devices. It improved the battery life dramatically and gave a big improvement in performance. Therefore, software itself plays a pretty big role in the battery performance.
Now there’s only on way to legit fix it. You have to update or either flash a custom rom on your device. Waiting is what most of the people hate. That’s why custom ROMS are a thing. You can find ROMS for literally any device available. So it can also fix the slow charging of your mobile device.
Let’s talk about some of the tricks that you want to apply for fast charging your phone.
Tips to charge your phone Fast
There are a certain things you can do to fast charge your phone. So let’s talk it out.
1. Airplane mode
Putting your phone of Airplane mode can dramatically increase the charging time of your phone. But why? It’s because when you enter airplane mode, it turns off all sorts of services and signals going in and out from your phone. This trick ultimately saves your battery life.
In addition to saving the battery, it provides faster charging times too. Therefore, in most phones the airplane mode can simply be access in the notification bar.
2. Turning Off the Phone
It’s simple as cake. Turning off the phone will not use any resources at all. When your phone is on, it takes battery from all sorts of components. For example, screen and other background apps.
Even at idle times, the battery is just getting sucked by various means. Therefore, turning off your phone will dramatically increase battery life.
3. Use Wall Charger
It is always recommended to charge your phone with a wall socket. The true potential of charging is unleashed using wall socket. Most of the sockets are made to fast charge you device. In contrast to that, charging from other sources is definitely not recommended.
This is due to the fact that current is limited on other devices as we’ve mentioned above.
4. Avoid Wireless Charging
We all know how cool is wireless charging. But with this cool piece of technology comes a great compromise. And that is slow charging. On the other hand, wired USB cables provides faster charging times. That’s why we should always avoid wireless charging.
Moreover, in future we will be able to see wireless charging in most of the newer devices that will support fast charging. But as of now, wireless fast chargers are only available for a couple of brands.
Final Words
At this point, you should definitely let a professional do his job. This minimizes the risk of putting you phone through various kind of risks. Moreover, you might permanently damage your phone. In addition to that, there’s a chance that you might even void the warranty of your phone.
Therefore, if you really want to put your phone through risk. You should have the know-how of how these things work. If you’re a professional in assembling and disassembling of different devices. Then I can recommend you to do whatever you want with your phone. There are literally a lot of solutions but it depends upon the sort of problems you’re having.
These are all the 11 Problems that might be causing problems to your phone. We’ve covered all the problems from head to toe. But if you think that we missed something, do let us know. That right here sums up the whole article if you’re having slow charge.