If you are looking for the best iPhone fast charger? We’ve got you covered! We tested A LOT of chargers in order to make this post. And if you find/buy one of our recommend chargers, we’ve also included a Buyer’s guide to to help you shop wisely.
Specifically, the best iPhone fast charger is the SCOSCHE HPDA2C8 Powervolt. If you need more ports, our recommended charger would be the Nekteck 4-port 72W USB Wall Charger. More details below!
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Best Usb-pd Charger
SCOSCHE HPDA2C8 Powervolt
BEST MULTI-PORT USB-PD Charger
Nekteck 4-port 72W USB Wall Charger
At Mobile Reviews Eh!, we base our reviews on actual usage. We don’t recommend ANYTHING without knowing the pros and cons of the product. When we decided to figure out whatʼs the best USB-PD charger for fast charging on the iPhone, we thought it would take a month or so but it actually took us more than 4 months to finalize what we thought the best iPhone fast charger was going to be. Here’s a list of all the chargers we had to use during our test period:
- Anker USB Type C Wall Charger (1 Port)
- Anker USB Type C Wall Charger (4 Port)
- Aukey 18W USB-C PD charger
- Apple ESR Cable
- Apple Mac Cable
- CHOETECH USB C Charger
- GreatCool 30W Type C PD Charger
- Nekteck 4-port 72W USB Wall Charger
- RAVPower USB C Power Delivery Charger
- SCOSCHE HPDA2C8 Powervolt
For this review, we ran most of the charge tests on a single iPhone, in the same room, on the same power bar, using the same cable. We let the device charge up while using an app called Amperes to track the charge rates. After each charge, we would drain the iPhone by leaving the camera on in slo-mo with the torch turned on.As a side note, the quality of the battery on our test iPhone didnʼt change between the start and end of this review. Dozens of useless discharges and the iPhone XRʼs battery is still in good shape.
Whatʼs USB-PD?
USB-PD stands for Universal Serial Bus-Power Delivery which is a standard established in 2012 and has seen several revisions since. USB-PD isnʼt quite the same as fast charging found on certain Android products but some fast-chargers are USB-PD compliant.
The benefit of the USB-PD is that it will provide devices with the “right” wattage. Instead of one rate, the charger will give the “best” rate to the connected device.
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What is Fast Charging?
Fast charge on a iPhone 8 or later allows you to charge your battery up to 50% in 30 minutes.
In fact, fast charge is pretty much the main reason why we donʼt really care about how much power our iPhone has. Honestly, our iPhone’s usually sits between 20-50% since we know we get a giant hit of power whenever we need it with a fast charger.
The worst thing about fast charging on the iPhone is that Apple doesnʼt include a fast charger with their latest smartphones which is the biggest annoyance for fast charging on the iPhone.
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How different are the USB-PD charge rates?
Hereʼs the graph of all the chargers we used. In this graph, taller is better so these stubbies are outliers. The worst performing results came from GreatCool 30W Type C PD Charger and charging with a non-MFI certified cable.
Once we remove the outliers, weʼll see that to get 1% charge during the fast charge phase, the fastest chargers can do it in 32 seconds while the slowest take over 40 seconds. Oddly enough, the second slowest charger in our tests was the Apple 18W iPad Charger. To get to 50%, that means the fastest charger, the Scosche did it in ~26 minutes and the slowest charger was 35 minutes.
The difference in 9 minutes would equate to a 10% charge on our iPhone XR. Is that a deal breaker? Maybe for some but we havenʼt had a situation where 10% was a deal breaker in recent memory. Especially when you consider that the crappy stock iPhone charger takes 90 minutes to provide the same charge.
The worst charger? It’s the GreatCool 30W Type C PD Charger. It’s one of the cheapest chargers that we used which may seem like an attractive feature for some BUT it has the worst/inconsistent charge rates out of our test group of products. Honestly do you really want to plug the cheapest charger you find in your $1000 iPhone?
Out of these tests, we did notice an odd thing between chargers from the same brand. The Anker 4 Port charger was much faster than the single port Anker charger. Why is this? We have no idea.
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How different are the max load on USB-PD chargers?
Out of our plethora of fast chargers, there were a handful that could handle multiple devices at once. Most of these devices had a variation of intelligent charging. From what we can see, intelligent charging basically means that itʼs going to max out one or two ports, charging those devices faster than the remainder of the devices.
This happens because the charger has a set amount of voltage it can supply all the ports so itʼs going to split it up accordingly. The question that we had for these chargers was: Does maxing out the load of the charger have any impact on the USB-PD port?
The short answer is no. Thatʼs actually the long answer as well.
Our recommended product when it comes to multiple-port chargers is the Nekteck charger. Itʼs the only product that passes our two criteria listed in the Buyer’s guide at the bottom of this post. The RavPower charger is actually lying a bit about their wattage.
Let us elaborate on the lie. Nekteck says that itʼs a 60W charger and the output is actually 60W. RavPower says their charger is 60W as well but Ravʼs 60Wʼs comes from adding 45W from the USB-PD charger and the 15Wʼs from the USB-A ports.
Now if all youʼre doing is charging your iPhone, this isnʼt going to matter but you might have trouble powering anything but a small laptop. A 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 60W charger so the Nekteck should be able to charge it without any issue, even with gaming or video editing.
We have a 15-inch MacBook Pro that comes with a 87W charger which is much larger than the 60W provided by the Nekteck charger. The Nekteck charger will work fine with web-surfing and normal computer usage but the laptop battery will slowly drain if you’re gaming.
Hereʼs a photo of the amperage provided by the included charger block which results in the wattage being over 80 at times. If we use the Nekteck 4-port 72W USB Wall Charger, it getʼs close to 60W but never goes over. That means our laptop is out 20W at that moment so itʼs pulling the missing power out of the battery.
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How different are the sizes of USB-PD chargers?
The smallest charger in this batch belongs to Aukey 18W USB-C PD charger. Itʼs a little bigger than your standard iPhone charger so if youʼre constrained by space, still donʼt get the Aukey 18W USB-C PD charger. It fails our buyer guide test.
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Buyers Guide
Despite using several different chargers, itʼs a fraction of whatʼs actually out there. And we canʼt test them all. Nor do we want to. So hereʼs two things that weʼd pay attention to when looking at fast chargers.
Make sure itʼs a USB compliant product
USB is a standard that manufacturers ~try too manufacture to. If you go to USB.org, you can search for products to see if they are certified. Basically, if thereʼs USB logo on it, it should be certified.
Now it does say that showing up in this list is up to the manufacturer to do so but personally, if youʼre a company that makes USB charging products, why arenʼt you in the USB-IF database?
Out of our collection of USB-PD chargers, half of them didn’t show up in the database. The other half do. The 1/2 that donʼt show up in the database include chargers from Aukey 18W USB-C PD charger, CHOETECH USB C Charger, GreatCool 30W Type C PD Charger and RAVPower USB C Power Delivery Charger. We were surprised that RAVPower USB C Power Delivery Charger wasnʼt in the list as their products feel solid and well built But they could have certified under another name.
The first three brands didnʼt surprise us because the products from Aukey, Choetech and Greatcool were the cheapest and the build quality of the products seemed poor. For example, Aukey couldnʼt figure out how to print the product information in a straight line, Greatcool canʼt charge our iPhone at a consistent rate and Choetechʼs port isnʼt actually lined up with the casing and the cable we bought from them actually got stuck in my laptop the first few times we used it.
The crazy thing about the Choetech is that it is one of the most popular chargers on Amazon and itʼs not certified. As much as we love things that are cheap, maybe buying a discount charger isnʼt a good idea. Do you really want to a cheap product plugged into your $1800 dollar iPhone?
Oddly enough, Apple wasnʼt in the USB compliant product list. Or the product numbers or the name “Apple” wasnʼt in the list. Maybe itʼs under a shell corporation? Sneaky Apple. But we’re pretty sure Appleʼs own chargers are going to be decent.
The products that show up in the USB database include products from Anker, Nekteck and Scosche but out of these three, only the Nekteck had the USB symbol. The build quality of these products feels exponentially better than the other products. They feel solid, the edges meet up and the labels are on straight. Which is why weʼd recommend them. We know we havenʼt explicitly recommend an Anker product but you canʼt go wrong with that brand.
Pay attention to maximum wattage
Make sure that you know what the maximum wattage is on the fast charge port. We’ve already talked about how RavPower is a bit of a jerk for saying their charger is a 60W charger when the reality is that the USB-PD port is only 45W and the rest of the ports are 15W.
This is going to be important for people who are planning on using their PD charger with a laptop. The 45W provided by the RavPower will still power a 15-inch MacBook Pro if all you were doing was surfing the internet. The moment you start doing anything that requires a bit of processing power (like using Pro apps or gaming) the charger isn’t going to provide enough power. You’ll end up slowly draining your battery.
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So that’s what we think are the The Best iPhone Fast Chargers for the XR, XS, X and 8’s! Have any questions? Leave them below! Definitely SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube Channel to stay on top of all the new things we are review!
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