Yesterday a rumor (in Chinese) claimed the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max would get reverse wireless charging support, in a first for any Apple smartphone ever.
Don’t take out the champagne just yet, though. Google just launched the Pixel 10 family with Qi2 wireless charging with built-in magnets – this is essentially the same tech that Apple uses under the MagSafe brand, since Apple practically open-sourced it a few years back in a bid to get it to be the industry standard, which it now is.
So, it’s the same thing but under a different name, and yet Google had to leave out reverse wireless charging support from all Pixel 10 devices, since, the company says, it’s incompatible with Qi2 wireless charging with magnets because (the following is machine translated from Portuguese) “the magnet set creates a strong connection with the charger but has a physical limitation for reverse wireless charging”.
Thus, it’s highly likely that Apple simply can’t launch support for reverse wireless charging on its next iPhones for the same reason – unless the Cupertino company sneakily kept a way for reverse wireless charging to work alongside magnets for itself, not putting it into the standard it more or less donated to the Wireless Power Consortium, which is in charge of the Qi standard.
That’s not impossible, but it’s also not very likely, so you really shouldn’t get your hopes up about any iPhone including reverse wireless charging anytime soon.