I spend a fair bit of time dealing with various types of batteries (lithium and otherwise) as part of electronics hobbies and interests, and yes there's a lot of things that can lead to inadvertently killing a battery. Lithium based batteries are particularly vulnerable to misuse and need special care if you want to get the most out of them. In most consumer electronics though the batteries are managed automatically by the hardware which means you the user have to trust it's doing it's job. You at least have control over when to charge which is most of what you need to get the most out the battery.
Complicating all this is the fact that there's several quite different kinds of battery that fall under the much quoted 'lithium ion' banner. You ideally need to know which specific chemistry you're dealing with. For example, you will see electronics guides often saying you shouldn't leave lithium-ion batteries sitting around fully charged as this degrades them. Which is perfectly true for the lithium-cobalt chemistry and that in general is what you will find in phones, laptops and tablets etc. However there's another chemistry out there called lithium-iron-phosphate which does not degrade at all when stored fully charged so that advice doesn't apply. How do you know if device X uses lithium-cobalt or lithium-phosphate? It might tell you in the datasheets for the product, failing that you can tell from the nominal voltage of the battery, if you can get access to the terminals (difficult if said battery is sealed inside a non-serviceable phone).
Generally you can assume modern devices use lithium-cobalt and that has the unfortunate habit of degrading rapidly if it's stored full charged, doubly so if it's stored full charge at high temperature. So you know those people who use laptops plugged in most of the time, but the keep the battery installed and fully charged? Yep that's a sure fire way to wreck the battery in short order. Happened to me before I understood this stuff especially since there's tons of misleading and not-quite-right information out there on this topic.
Lithium-cobalt cells are also damaged by being discharged too far, depending on how badly the effect can be barely noticeable to catastrophic. Lithium-ion in general has very low self discharge but it's not zero so if the cell is barely charged and left to sit the voltage will drop into the danger zone and it will slowly kill itself. This is also why leaving them fully charged kills them too, they'll stay practically fully charged for years at a time, degrading with every second. The advice for storing these cells then is to keep them approximately half charged as that minimises the degradation. Lowering the temperature of storage helps greatly as well so if you have a lithium battery you will not be using for a while you can safely keep it in the fridge (not the freezer!) and it will hold it's performance/capacity very well when you start to use it again (let it warm up first).
If you want more reading on batteries look up forums for flashlight fanatics and radio-control addicts (guilty on both counts). Will get you a proper understanding of how to maximise the life of any sort of battery compared to the hearsay you can pick up from other places. I still see people saying you should fully discharge lithium-ion batteries before charging them, this is a holdover from the distant days when nickel-based rechargeables were prominent (and it wasn't really true for them either). Doing this with lithium based batteries is making them worse not better.
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