[pooper]

> Phones are not designed for continuous power draw (and consequent heat dissipation) - contant-use power dissipation limits are very low.

Maybe someone here can help me understand how power draw works on Android.

I have a ZTE Z959, a Cricket device. I use the phone to take photos with Open Camera every few seconds and stitch them together to make a video with ffmpeg. (Someone told me that YouTube has no practical limit on storage and I wanted to prove that they will cap me at some point but that is a topic for another day. Basically, the tl;dr here is for my casual use, YouTube has unlimited storage).

But I digress. The point is at some point the phone's battery started swelling up which became a fire hazard. I wanted to power the phone without battery. I have a Thinkpad 65W USB type-C charger. The first challenge was easy to work around. The phone just goes on a boot loop but if I add the battery and plug in the charger, the phone boots up ok. After the phone boots, I can remove the battery and the phone stays on (provided I don't do things like use flash, my guess is flash needs more power than my charger can provide.

Can someone shed more light into this process? How does all of this work? Does all of this mean my phone is technically running from battery even when it is connected to the wall?