TL;DR
- Android 15 is preparing to tweak the threshold that determines whether a charger is seen as fast, from a measly 7.5W to a more reasonable 20W.
- The operating system has long considered any charging speeds of at least 7.5W to be fast, which is far, far below what actual fast chargers can deliver nowadays.
- The change isn’t live yet in the latest Android 15 beta, though, so chargers that deliver 7.5W of power will still be seen as fast on Pixels.
Why not just show the charging W on the screen instead of ‘fast’.
Because the less tech savvy people will be confused when the battery starts getting full and charging speed tapers off which will lead to complaints about their 20w charger only providing 3w of power.
Then give a setting to enable it in the developer settings.
Android is catering to the general public. The average user would easily understand fast, slow and normal. 20w, 68w, 5w not so much. But, I agree not having to use apps or 3rd party cables just to see the charging watts would be great. Even a Dev flag to enable the feature would be cool.
That’s ridiculous. People have been buying light bulbs based on Watts for around a century and understand that higher W means brighter and more power.
Bad example. People are still confused with light bulbs. That’s why they still say the equivalent wattage to incandescent bulbs.
Bigger number go faster
You make it sound like a joke but that’s literally all it takes here.
Fast, normal, and slow are not clear either, I think. We see here that the “fast” term needs to evolve because it probably feels pretty slow now. Wattages are pretty clear reference points when users come to understand what they mean, especially over time.
Expecting the average user to understand numbers is a high expectation
Seriously. This thought occurred to me the other day when I plugged my power bank into a car’s charging port to check the wattage and wondered “why the fuck can’t my phone just do this by default?” Do we actually not trust people to understand higher number = faster?
Charging… the car?
I think they meant they plugged the battery bank into the car’s phone charger?
How does that tell them the wattage output of the power bank
Maybe they have a wattage reader on their charger/power bank/car?
Many custom roms do that