Your Pixel phone can occasionally bypass the 80% charging limit

Google recently rolled out the long-awaited 80% charging limit to the Pixel series. You may have heard about it before. The iPhones and other Android smartphones already have this feature. For those uninitiated, Google aims for long-term battery health with this feature. However, a new report indicates that your Pixel phone can occasionally bypass the 80% charging limit to hit the 100% mark.

Your Pixel phone can occasionally bypass the 80% charging limit and it isn’t a bug

The news comes via Android Authority’s contributor AssembleDebug who recently discovered a new note in the charging optimization section of Google’s Settings Services app (version 1.1.0.697513890).

The spotted note hints that your Pixel phone sometimes bypasses the 80% charging limit set by you. It’s important to note that this behavior isn’t a bug. In fact, Google has intentionally designed the feature to work this way. The updated note further explains that the Google Pixel phone may fully charge sometimes to “recalibrate estimate capacity.”

It’s possible that charging your phone repeatedly to 80% may give an inaccurate reading of the battery’s health. The intended behavior prevents that specific issue and gives an accurate reading. After all, the last thing you want is for your device to die due to inaccurate battery life predictions.

Many smartphones can already do this

In case you don’t know, this isn’t a new concept. Many Samsung Galaxy phones and iPhones can bypass the set charging limit. Apple even has a guide on its official website where it explains that this behavior helps to “maintain accurate battery state-of-charge estimates.”

All that said, Google hasn’t rolled out the bypass charging behavior on any Pixel phones just yet. However, we expect the company to push it with the Android 15 QPR 1 release. There’s no official announcement in this regard, all we can do is speculate for now.