Overcharging used to cause anxiety among phone owners. The fear was that keeping a phone constantly plugged in could charge a battery beyond its capacity, making the battery unstable, which could degrade overall battery life or build up too much internal heat and cause the battery to burst or catch fire.
According to the experts we spoke with, however, a battery’s management system is designed to shut off the electrical charge once a battery reaches 100%, before it can overcharge.
Unless something goes wrong with the battery circuitry, you can’t overcharge a modern phone, because they have protection built in to exactly stop that from happening.
For example apple takes a clever approach to this problem, starting with the iOS 13 software, that charges your iPhone battery to 100% without doing long-term damage.
If you frequently keep your iPhone plugged in during the day or while you sleep, you can turn on an iOS 13 battery setting called Optimized Battery Charging that will monitor your charging schedule and hold your iPhone’s battery charge at 80%, keeping it out of the stress zone. After that point, it’ll top off the charge to 100% right before you regularly unplug your phone. This works best for people who have a regular charging pattern.
For a manual approach, you can also unplug your phone when it hits an 80% charge, but the trade-off is you might miss out on additional hours of use that you’d get from a fully charged phone.