Wireless Charging woes...

[Portreve]

I have been trying to get my Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra to work properly and stable-ly with an assorted range of car wireless chargers, and ultimately I have had no luck whatsoever. And, it's really weird, because they (for the most part) start out working just fine, or almost fine, and after anywhere between let's say 2 weeks and maybe a month, they develop problems with my phone, and start having different kinds of issues, the sum total of which is they will just not work with my phone after that point.

Because we're talking about several different models, and several different brands, I think it's unlikely that they are all lemons, or lemon brands.

Today, I stopped at my local Best Buy to buy a standard (non-charging) mount for my car, and along the way I had an interesting conversation with one of their people, who said he's got an iPhone, but in working there he's dealt with people with various different Android phones as well as iPhones, and it seems to him the whole compatibility thing is not exactly uncommon. His only suggestion was for me to take my case off and try it without that. It's not a thick case; it's just a Speck Presidio Grip which cannot add more than about 2 - 2.5 mm of extra distance between the back surface of the phone and the surface of the charger. Nevertheless, it is a distance, and it's one I could eliminate by taking the case off, which I did.

And, for like 5 minutes, it seemed like everything was working. Then, it lapsed into bouncing between going into wireless charging mode and then stating that "Wireless Charging Paused". It's literally flipping back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, endlessly. This, incidentally, was the exact behavior I was seeing with the case on. So...

What I don't understand is what's behind all of this. I have multiple wireless chargers in my home, and my phone has absolutely NO problem with any of them. Two of them are Samsung chargers (one is the current generation "Trio" charger, the other is one I bought perhaps four years ago or so), and regardless of whether the charger is up to the task of giving me rapid charging or not, there has never once ever been an incompatibility issue with any of them.

I even had an idle (somewhat-ish) thought about saying screw it and buying an iPhone 12. However, from what the Mobile rep at Best Buy was saying, it sounds like that wouldn't have made any difference.

Has anyone here dealt with any of this? Does anyone have an idea how one might try and solve this problem?

For the moment, I have a non-charging mount set up in my car, and I'm just going to use that along with a standard wired connection.


Oh, and another thing...

My car does not have Bluetooth connectivity to the head unit, so that means I'm limited to a USB connection (which isn't something usable with modern Android phones because there's no head unit support for MTP) or an AUX connection. I've been using one of Roav's Bolt Google Assistant units. In principle, this works as a Bluetooth adapter which also provides a car version of Google Nest, which is actually pretty cool. However, I've owned two of them, and they've both been a bit flaky, and the second unit of which just died on me the other day.

What I had been doing is using a USB C -> Headphones adapter cable to just connect my phone directly to the AUX jack. However, I had to stop doing that because I had had to go back to wired charging, and so I didn't have a port any longer. I've tried the ear bud thing, but the problem with that is my left ear is slightly misshapen, so at casual glance you'd never know it to look at me, but regular ear buds do not fit in it, which other than using one of the type where it goes into my outer ear canal, I can only put an ear bud in my right ear. That's fine, unless I wanted to listen to music. Most of the time, I'm listening to audio books or podcasts, so I don't need stereo, but there also comes a point where it irritates my ear, so I can't keep it in any longer. And, even if I could, at some point the battery will just run down.


This is all really getting to be pretty frustrating. I guess maybe I'm just kind of venting here, but I'm looking for input from the community.