Qualcomm has developed wireless charging tech for phones with metal rear cases, compatible with its Rezence standard
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 wireless charging was a two-camp fight: the WPC's Qi versus Qualcomm's Rezence, and Qi's biggest practical weakness was that radio waves struggle through the aluminum unibodies phone makers preferred. Qualcomm's new metal-compatible Rezence technology attacks exactly that gap, giving handset vendors a way to ship premium all-metal designs without abandoning wireless charging.
The long arc matters here: rather than splitting forever, the market consolidated around the Qi lineage — WPC and Apple built Qi2 out of MagSafe, and by CES 2024 broad Qi2 support had become the interoperability story of the show — leaving Rezence as the losing side of this bet.
First-order effects
- Phone makers weighing metal rear cases get a third option beyond plastic backs or Qi-only designs: adopt Qualcomm silicon and keep both the build material and wireless charging.
- Qualcomm opens a new royalty and chip-design win beyond its baseband business, at a moment when its relationships with big customers were already under strain.
Second-order effects
- The WPC's Qi camp faces pressure to close the same metal-compatibility gap or concede the premium-metal segment, pushing both standards bodies into a feature race over penetration and efficiency.
- Accessory and furniture makers (charging pads, embedded surfaces) have to hedge across two incompatible standards, raising their costs until one camp clearly wins.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, fragmented wireless-power standards collapse into a single consortium-controlled one — which is what happened, as Qualcomm itself pivoted its charging identity toward wired Quick Charge 5 while Qi2 carried the wireless standard forward to 25W with major Android makers on board.
- Control of the surviving standard becomes strategically valuable: whoever sets the spec shapes licensing, magnet alignment ecosystems, and how tightly accessories lock to specific device families.
The trend: Wireless-charging standards are consolidating around the WPC's Qi lineage, squeezing rival camps like Rezence and pushing Qualcomm's charging ambitions back toward wired Quick Charge.