I have a Samsung Galaxy A52 that I bought about 2 years ago and the battery doesn't even last me half a day anymore. At first it easily lasted until the evening. What exactly happens to the battery for it to lose capacity like that?
The best thing you can do right now is avoid letting your phone charge all the way to 100% or drop to 0% - keeping it between 20% and 80% really does extend battery life a lot, even though it sounds weird. What others left out is that heat speeds up degradation a ton: if your phone is in the car all day, in the sun, or hot while you're charging it, the battery degrades way faster than from charge cycles alone.
What happens is that lithium-ion batteries have limited charge cycles. Every time you charge and discharge your phone, lithium ions move between the electrodes and generate chemical stress on the internal structure. After hundreds of cycles - in your case, two years of use probably means around 500-700 cycles - the battery loses capacity irreversibly. It's like a spring that gradually loosens until it no longer returns to its original position.
Plus, other factors speed up the wear. Heat is one of the worst enemies; if you leave your phone in the sun, charge it while using it intensely, or it's just really hot where you live, degradation accelerates quite a bit. How you charge also matters: leaving your phone plugged in all night or constantly charging it to 100% stresses the battery more than keeping it between 20% and 80%, for example.
In the Galaxy A52, the battery degrades normally after two years of use. Most manufacturers design batteries to maintain around 80% capacity after 500 charge cycles. If yours is already pretty dead, you've probably accumulated those cycles without too many precautions, or the phone simply got hot. The good news is that replacing the battery is relatively cheap and straightforward on that model.
The problem is that after those charge cycles, the materials inside the battery degrade at a chemical level 🔋 lithium ions keep losing their ability to move around and substances accumulate that block the flow. What people don't mention is that heat speeds all this up a lot - if your Galaxy A52 heats up regularly (from heavy apps, being in the sun, or because the battery's already old and generates heat on its own), that degradation becomes brutal. That said, the advice about not charging to 100% or letting it drop to 0% is valid, but honestly after 2 years of normal use you've already done a fair amount of damage without realizing it, so at this point the best thing is just to replace the battery or live with it 😅
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