How to Make Your Phone Charge Faster

Waiting for your phone to charge is like waiting for the oven to preheat, or your baby to fall asleep. It’s one of those things that’s really annoying to wait for, so let’s try to minimize how long it takes to charge our phones.

If you want to charge your phone as quickly as possible, always put it in Airplane mode before plugging in your charger. When your phone is in Airplane mode, it stops using cellular, Bluetooth, radio, and Wi-Fi features that constantly drain your battery in the background.

It’s super easy to turn on Airplane mode on both iPhone and Android devices. Go to the Settings on your device and you can enable Airplane mode on the first screen you see. Alternatively, you can turn it off in your iPhone’s Control Center as well.

Wall chargers, like the one your phone came with, have a stronger electrical output than what you’ll get by plugging your cable directly into a USB port. You should also stick with the name-brand chargers to get the quickest results. Apple chargers work the best for iPhones and Samsung chargers work the best for Galaxies. None of this “we have a charger at home” stuff where you end up using some random charger buried in a drawer—that will take forever to charge.

Another alternative to charging your phone if you are on the go or traveling is to invest in a portable phone charger. Portable chargers are inexpensive and can offer your phone battery some more juice if you are worried that your phone may die while you're away from your home or you can't find a wall charger. This option won't make your phone charge faster, but it will ensure you don't end up stuck somewhere without a charged phone.

Make sure to turn off your phone’s display while charging to get a little boost. All things being equal, we found a phone with its display turned off charges about 83% faster than a phone with its display turned on. To test this, we plugged in an iPhone and let it sit for 15 minutes with the display on, and the battery only increased by 6%. We tried the same thing with the display turned off, and it nearly doubled its productivity, charging 11% of the battery in 15 minutes.

The more stuff you do on your phone while it's charging, the slower it will charge. For example, if you’re playing a game on your phone while it charges, it’ll charge way slower. In fact, I’ve even seen my battery decrease while plugged in and family a game at the same time. We all thought that was supposed to be impossible, but turns out we can still lose battery while plugged in if we’re doing some intensive gaming or streaming.

Third-party companies are coming out with rapid chargers that can actually beat out the name-brand chargers. They’re a bit more expensive than your average third-party charger, but they can save you a lot of charging time. We’ve been impressed by the Anker USB Type C Wall Charger on Amazon. Users say that this bad boy can charge a compatible device by 15% in 20 minutes, compared to 6% with a generic charger. Your mileage may vary, but you can expect about a 1.4x improved charging speed with these 30-watt rapid chargers.

If your phone is exposed to temperatures over 95° F, the battery will start to drain more quickly. Likewise, if your phone is charging while sitting in the sun, it’ll charge way slower. Definitely don’t put your phone in the fridge or anything, but find at least a room temperature to charge your phone.