According to the article, why does Airplane Mode speed up charging?

It shuts off power-draining radios so more incoming charge goes into the battery

It increases the voltage flowing from the charger into the battery

It cools the battery down so it accepts charge more efficiently

It shuts off power-draining radios so more incoming charge goes into the battery

It tells the phone to skip its slow trickle-charging safety mode

🔋 Your phone charges faster in Airplane Mode — here's the physics

Plug your phone in and it does more than sip electricity — it's constantly working. Even with the screen off, it's pinging cell towers, refreshing email, syncing apps, and hunting for Wi-Fi. Every one of those tasks draws power out of the battery at the same moment your charger is trying to push power in. The result is a quiet tug-of-war that slows the whole process down.

Switching on Airplane Mode cuts off the biggest background drains — the cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth radios that keep your phone chatting with the world. With those silenced, nearly all the incoming charge goes straight into the battery instead of being spent keeping you connected. Tests routinely show this can shave a meaningful chunk of time off a full charge, especially from a near-empty start.

The same logic scales up: powering the phone completely off charges it even faster, since nothing at all is competing for the current. The trade-off is obvious — you won't get calls or messages while disconnected — so this is a hack for when you need a quick top-up before heading out, not for your overnight charge.