iPhone SE (2020) sudden wireless charging problems

Hi all. I cant figure out how to reply to you all without making individual replies for each, so this is a response to all three comments so far: it's not being caused by the battery health.

When I say my phone's battery health is "stable" I mean that it has been sat at 75% for at least the last 18 months - and I would wager it's been that low for even longer than that. The battery health/max charge capacity indicator was lowered severely in the first year or two of this phone's life due to poor charging hygiene (leaving it on charge after reaching 100%, starting charging after small percentage drops/not waiting until its really low or even flat before charging, etc). But it's worth noting that percentage is solely how much charge Apple thinks the phone can hold relative to its capacity at new - it signifies nothing else. It wasn't until recently that label changed from the far more descriptive "Maximum capacity" to the vague and hair-raising "Battery health". Jeff's screenshot even shows this - it's exclusively a rating of how much juice the battery can hold, not a rating of its performance or any other aspect of the iPhone's health. And again, it's been at 75% for an extremely long time, especially when the charging issue only took hold within the last week. I could understand battery health being relevant if it had suddenly dropped to this from above 80%, or even had suddenly dropped by a notable amount, but this is not the case. Unless Apple is doing something shady and making the phone refuse to charge - without explanation - to "encourage" people to replace their battery, I strongly do not believe this is causing the problem with wireless charging. In fact, I would expect a similar throttling on wired charging too, which I have not seen.

Regardless, I did some testing.

1. Force restart seemed to fix the problem... for about 5 minutes. I didn't end up reaching 80% mark.I dont think my phone has seen 80% battery since Friday.
2. Nobody's suggested updating beyond 26.1 yet so I haven't done that. I haven't yet looked to see if charging issues are listed in changelogs for any updates after, but that'll be my job tomorrow. And I'll only consider updating if I either find evidence that there was a known issue with fast charging resolved at some point. (Though, I don't think this is the issue either - otherwise it would have started sooner after updating to 26.1)
3. I got ahold of an iPhone SE 2020 with even worse battery health, 73%. It does not have problems with using either of these wireless chargers. Neither does an XR (didn't check the battery health on that one, but it's not perfect and has never been serviced), nor an iPhone Air that's only about a month and a half old. The new wireless charger also has a watch charging pad, which works just fine with my new Series 10. I think we can rule out the wireless chargers being the issue, too.

Ran out of space, here's response 2/3:

Regarding some obvious thoughts:

• I don't really fancy taking out a loan just to have the battery serviced, particularly when nobody has yet said specifically that this exact issue was fixed after having a battery replacement. I also can't rely on not having a phone for an extended period, so I would need to secure alternative provisions - more money. The nearest Apple store isn't exactly nearby, not that I can drive anyway, meaning I either spend more money to get there or I risk a more local option (the latter of which was never on my radar, to be clear). To avoid the inevitable: the phone was purchased for me, so I suppose "I bought" in my initial message was a poor choice of words. I personally do not have the funds to be throwing around like this, which is why I'm trying to investigate every other possible route first. If it's going to cost me an arm and a leg, I might as well just upgrade to a newer-but-not-newest phone instead as the SE 2020 will likely fall out of support in the next one or two major OS versions anyway - it only barely got iOS 26.
• The wireless chargers are both third party (if I had $60 to drop on an Apple charger over a third party one, I'd also have enough money to throw a battery replacement at the problem too). But as previously covered, this is not the issue either. One of the chargers served me well for five or so years, and both work fine on other Apple phones of various age and model.
• Physically plugging a cable in is difficult for me as I have a disability that impacts my dexterity - hence why wireless is ideal for me. My first wireless charging cradle is the same width as my phone, making lining the phone up with the charging coil easy, and it's an upright cradle stand so no worries about it sliding off. Alongside the second wireless charger I bought a MagSafe case, as the new charger has the puck on an articulating arm so I wouldn't have been able to place it so easily and it would have a much lower chance of staying there. Charging remains in the initially "half-working" state with and without the new case, as with my original case and caseless attempts, on both wireless chargers (so it's also not too thick, before anyone asks).
• I've tried those third party cables with magnets in where the cable can detach while keeping the plug in the socket. They work great, and are certainly more accessible than a plain Lightning cable... until they inevitably break. Fishing out the magnet stub of the phone is infinitely worse than trying to plug a normal cable in, and because none of those cables have the same pin configuration they are hard to just buy a replacement cable for when they do break. Nice in theory, not so nice in practice.
• Since the initial problem arose, the older wireless charger has charged my phone to an "okay" degree very very occasionally. Not brilliant, slower than it was a week ago, but it at least trickle charges my phone. But this happens maybe 1 in 10 times, and doesn't last forever. However, until these last few days it would work 100% of the time. I don't know why the new charger doesn't have these lucky breaks, but it seems pointless to dwell on that given everything else pointing away from the "it's because they're third party chargers" argument.
• Maybe it's also worth noting at this point that the older charger almost never activated fast charging for my phone. It would always fast charge my partner's phones (both some kind of Android device), but for my SE it would sit on slow charging almost exclusively. I didn't even realise the status light had two colours until my partner first put their phone on the cradle. This is fine for me. I don't care for fast charging (personally believe its more damaging to a battery's health) so I'm not concerned about that at all. What is bothering me is the inability to charge with any wireless charger full stop. Just putting this in to reinforce that it's not a case of fast charging not working either. Wireless charging of any kind isn't working properly.
• A more detailed description of how this played out at first: The first charger, two or three days ago, began to consistently refuse to charge (at any speed) and began to show its "charge error" light pattern. It was then that I noticed that in the 5 or so minutes I'd get with it "charging" prior to erroring out, it was doing so extremely slowly, or even losing charge. That led me to buy the new charger, which arrived and immediately exhibited the same problems.

Hit a response frequency wall too! Well, anyway, here's the last portion of my reply: I have never had the need for Apple to service any of my devices. I haven't even had a third party service them either. I have never had the need to. Battery health has never caused me any problems, and certainly never to this degree. Before this SE 2020 I was using an SE that only keeled over after running out of enough storage space to set up virtual RAM. The SE 2020's battery health was at 75% well before this issue arose, so it is extremely unlikely that is causing the issue. It's far more believable to me that the wireless coil has fried, or that SE 2020s now are just seeing these kinds of degradations as they're "old" by moderns standards. Hence why I am looking to hear from others who have experienced the same issue and found a fix. Speculation, particularly of the expensive kind, isn't helpful.

i dont know how else to phrase this to make it make sense: replacing the battery - especially without actual evidence that it will fix the problem - is not within my immediate budget. i do not have $60 to just drop on either a battery replacement or a certified/official wireless charger (since that will be the next line of enquiry), and i have low confidence that doing so will actually fix the problem given that the battery itself is behaving normally for it's condition and this is a six year old phone and Apple likes to curtail things after 5 years. the problem is in the wireless charging circuit, but i cant tell if its a software bug, a hardware failure (batteries are hardware, for the record), or planned obsolescence.

i am expressly wanting to hear from folks who have an iphone se 2020 (aka the iphone se gen 2) who have begun to experience wireless charging problems, what they have tried, and if they have fixed it. i can't entertain responses that state they havent read what i've put and then ask questions or make statements that have been answered by the things they've ignored.

i am trying to find out whether the iphone se 2020 is known, or beginning to be known, to have failing wireless charging circuits after some time. if i get replies from people who had this fixed by a battery replacement then i can be confident in putting my efforts towards that. if it's a known issue with the phone that a new battery won't fix/it will come back/etc then i know i should instead put money towards a new phone. if i get replies saying "i had this and it was fixed in iOS 26.2+" then i can update. if it's a setting, then i can change it. so on and so forth. i cannot afford to spend $120 odd only to find out that, "oops, actually these devices will fail in this manner after this kind of timeframe/usage!" just because i'm in the apple ecosystem it doesnt mean i have the budget to match.