5 Ways to Maintain Your Samsung Phone Battery Health for 7 Years of Updates

Most people don’t keep their phones for very long. While the hardware itself may still work well into the future, a lack of software support and rapidly improving technology forces the average user to get a newer model every two to four years. Fortunately, for those who want a phone they can rely on for years to come, many companies now promise software updates years later.

For Samsung’s flagship models, this period is an exceptional seven years. If you get a Samsung Galaxy S26 this year, you’ll receive important security updates as well as newer versions of One UI until 2033. However, if you want to continue using the same phone until then, you’ll need to treat it with care, since you’ll only be able to benefit from software updates if your phone is physically healthy.

There are many different areas that you will need to protect, but one of the most important is the battery. Unlike most other components, your phone’s lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery has a limited lifespan because batteries naturally degrade over time. You can’t counter this degradation, but you can target specific areas that increase the rate at which your battery loses capacity. You can do this by using proper charging accessories, implementing certain habits into your daily life, and avoiding extreme temperatures.

One of the biggest dangers to any battery cell is extreme temperature. This applies to both extreme cold and extreme heat, but the latter has a much greater permanent effect. Even if you don’t mind your phone getting a little toasty and performance dropping slightly, you should always be aware of how heat affects the longevity of your smartphone.

Li-ion batteries power your phone with a controlled, continuous chemical reaction. Chemical movement is directly related to heat; the hotter something is, the faster the particles move inside it. This interferes with the otherwise stable reaction that occurs at all times inside your phone’s battery, causing short-term battery fluctuations and gradually reducing your battery’s ability to hold a charge.

There’s not much you can do about the temperature outside, but there are still plenty of ways to protect your smartphone battery from the heat. The easiest way is to stop using your phone when it gets too hot; If you’re running a game that requires excessive processing and you notice your phone’s temperature rising, give it time to rest. If you live in a relatively warm climate, we also don’t recommend using your phone as an alternative to Android Auto for in-car navigation, as direct sunlight combined with a constant computer can heat up your handset very quickly. It’s also a good idea to minimize wireless charging due to the amount of heat it produces – or get a wireless charger with built-in cooling.

Batteries can be thought of as containers of energy, but the reality is a little more nuanced. The way they hold power is more like the way a sponge absorbs water than the way water fills a cup: the higher the battery percentage, the slower the device will charge and the more strain it will put on your phone’s battery. Batteries also physically increase in size as they gain charge, although the change is usually too insignificant to cause damage. However, if you constantly charge your phone to maximum, additional damage can accumulate over the years.

Most phones already stop consuming power once they reach 100%, but this continues to worsen battery degradation. There is no specific percentage where this becomes harmful: the more charged the battery, the more friction there will be with the incoming charge. We consider 80% to be the sweet spot, where you have enough battery to last all day while still protecting the longevity of your phone.

Besides just consciously pulling the plug when your phone has a healthy battery percentage, you can also use the battery protection feature built into Samsung smartphones. This feature is enabled by default and stops your phone from drawing power when fully charged, but you can change it to stop at the percentage you set it to, which should ideally be 80%. To do this, open the Settings on your Samsung smartphone, scroll down and select Batterythen press Battery protection. From there, tap Maximumthen use the slider to set the percentage.

We’ve talked about how overcharging your Samsung phone’s battery can make it worse, but the same goes for the other way around. Smartphone batteries require a constant flow of energy to continue functioning optimally. They degrade more quickly as they go through charge-discharge cycles, but they also get worse if they don’t go through these cycles for long periods of time.

This mostly applies to those who own secondary phones, but if you have a handset you don’t really need, leaving one off for days might not seem like too much of a problem. However, if you’ve exhausted the phone’s battery before you leave it and it doesn’t have any positively charged electrons in it, the battery passively degrades much faster than it otherwise would. This can cause passivation layers to build up on the positive and negative electrodes inside the battery, reducing the battery’s capacity as well as the ability to take charges.

It’s not a problem if you forget to charge your phone for a day while you’re on vacation, but if you plan to leave your phone in a drawer for days, you may not be able to take advantage of Samsung’s full update promise unless your battery is replaced.

Not all chargers are equal. Although almost all of them make the charging symbol appear on your phone and eventually charge it, using the wrong accessories can degrade the health of your phone’s battery, which is why you should always stay away from cheap chargers and charging cables.

Batteries, at their core, are blocks of chemical energy that produce electricity. This makes them incredibly prone to wear and tear and extremely destructive if something goes wrong. Fortunately, reputable manufacturers will follow strict guidelines to ensure that your phone’s battery receives the precise amount of power it needs, in the exact way that works best for it. If you get a cheap trash cable or charging brick without a label, there is no guarantee that these guidelines will be followed. If the charger you use daily is sending power at inconsistent voltages or your cable disconnects repeatedly, the damage can add up very quickly.

As such, getting an official charger from Samsung is usually the best option. Anker, Belkin, and Ugreen are also good options, but always check the labels. We recommend that you only opt for USB-IF certified chargers. Likewise, for wireless chargers, choose those certified Qi2.

The more charge and discharge cycles your phone goes through, the faster the battery will degrade. Hearing this, you might think that it’s more efficient to use every last drop of your phone’s battery before charging it again. After all, using your phone from 100% to 0% is just one discharge cycle, while letting it go down to 50%, fully charging it, and then letting it reach 50% again is two. This makes sense on paper, but in reality it would be worse for the Li-ion battery.

The reason is that discharge cycles simply aren’t all equal. The amount of time you let your phone charge or discharge also matters, but more importantly, letting the battery drain to 0% harms its longevity. Samsung already has a safety measure in place against this, where your phone turning off at 0% still keeps battery in reserve, but depending on how often this happens and how long the battery stays drained, the damage can add up over time.

To prevent this from happening, keep an eye out for Samsung’s low battery alerts, which appear by default when your battery drops to 15%. When you see one, put your phone on the charger instead of waiting – or at least stop using it for now. If you go the latter route, you may want to enable power saving mode under Settings > Battery > Power saving. You can also customize the low battery alert by going to Settings > Modes & Routines > Low Battery. This will allow you to make the notification much more visible. In the same menu you can have power saving mode activate by default when you reach a certain battery percentage.