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Overnight charging, letting the battery die, unplugging at exactly 100% — the charging habits that were once good advice and are now outdated or actively unnecessary
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Most persistent phone charging myths share a specific origin: they were genuinely accurate advice for an earlier generation of battery technology, and they never got updated as that technology changed. Nickel-cadmium and early nickel-metal-hydride batteries, common in consumer electronics before lithium-ion batteries became standard, suffered from a real phenomenon called the "memory effect," in which repeated partial charging cycles could reduce the battery's effective capacity over time — a genuine problem that made "always fully discharge before recharging" sound, practical advice for that specific technology.
Modern smartphones have used lithium-ion or lithium-polymer batteries for well over a decade, and these battery chemistries behave completely differently from their nickel-based predecessors: they don't suffer from memory effect, they degrade through a different mechanism entirely, and several of the charging habits developed to protect the older technology are neutral at best and mildly counterproductive at worst when applied to a modern lithium-ion battery. The myths persisted anyway, passed down through the specific mechanism of general folk technology advice that outlives the technology it was originally accurate for.
