Non-obvious Healthy Phone Habits (for the phone, not you)

I really don’t want this to happen, but imagine you return from vacation. You learn there is a naval + air blockade around Taiwan. People are buying electronics like they bought toilet paper in 2020. Retailers are out of stock, and new iPhones are selling on eBay for triple their usual price. Supply chains will take multiple years to recover. You need your current phone to stay happily working until then.

Sorry, that was bleak. Imagine you want your phone to last longer. What do?

Avoid charging to 100%. Avoid discharging to 0%. Both of these accelerate degradation of a lithium-ion battery. It will last (much) longer staying within, say, 20-80%. Recent iPhones and Google Pixels have a setting to automatically limit the charge level, just like an electric car. For other phones, get a Chargie or an open-source app that alerts you when to unplug.

A hot battery degrades more quickly. Charge slowly using a lower-power brick to keep it cooler. An hour to charge is good, more is even better.

Inductive (wireless) charging eliminates mechanical wear on your phone’s USB port, but makes additional heat. Three mitigations for this:

1. Get a magnet ring charger that precisely locates on the back of your phone. Good alignment makes power transfer more efficient, limiting heat generation. This is not an Apple-exclusive privilege. Several companies (Spigen, Torras, Ringke) make Android phone cases with a magnet ring. (You will mostly not find such cases at brick+mortar retailers. Exactly why is an exercise left to the reader.)
2. Take steps to aid heat dissipation. Escalating crazy:

• Lean the phone up diagonally so both sides get airflow (but facing down, so heat rises off of the charger and away from the phone).
• Put it in the exhaust stream of a fan or air purifier. Or, get a tiny, quiet USB-powered fan to aim at your phone while it charges.
• Get an actively-refrigerated inductive charger (yes, this actually exists).

3. Do not use inductive charging while the phone is doing something that also warms it up. (Navigation, hotspot, games, etc.) Use the USB-C port for those situations (but take care not to strain the connector).

Take a new USB-C cable. Mark one end as “clean” (perhaps with a marker). Start a monogamous relationship between your phone and the clean end of that cable. Your phone does not see other USB connectors, and the clean end of the cable does not see other ports (either of which may introduce abrasive dirt and contaminants to your phone’s USB port).

Yes, this can expand to a closed polycule with multiple cables.

When you put on pants, turn your pocket all the way inside out, down to the stitching at the very bottom. You’ll discover lint (even with brand new pants). Remove it before it clogs up your ports.

Limit use of your phone in direct sun. Modern phones with OLED displays will get much brighter when placed in the sun than they will manually via the brightness control. This is because direct-sun visibility is helpful (and reviewers will rate the maximum brightness), but driving an OLED display that hard shortens its lifespan. Limiting use in the sun also keeps the phone cooler, which reduces battery degradation.

If you’re doing something that warms the phone for a long time (e.g. navigation, hotspot, games), take it out of the case so it can dissipate heat better.

Stop using the power button. It has a critically important job, turning your phone on and off, which you cannot do any other way. It’s a mechanical button that can break. Its less-critical job, locking and unlocking the phone, can be done entirely with the screen. Look for a system setting to wake the phone when you tap the screen. To lock the phone, use Pineapple Lock Screen on Android, or some accessibility widget thing that an iPhone owner can tell you where to find.