Many people use their phone’s default auto-brightness setting, which tends to keep brightness levels around 30%-40% most of the time when indoors.
Backlight lightpaper software#
The software tools that Hu and his team have developed are based on new patent-pending power modeling technology they invented to more accurately estimate the power draw of OLED phone displays. OLED displays also allow phone screens to be ultrathin, flexible and foldable.īut the brightness of OLED screens largely determines how much dark mode saves battery life, said Hu, who has been researching ways to improve the energy efficiency of smartphones since they first hit the market over a decade ago. Because this type of screen doesn’t have a backlight like the LCD (liquid crystal display) screens of older phones, the screen will draw less power when displaying dark-colored pixels. Smartphones that came out after 2017 likely have an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen. Fact: Dark mode only makes a noticeable difference to battery life in certain scenarios The team recently presented this work at MobiSys 2021, a conference by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Backlight lightpaper android#
The researchers analyzed how dark mode affects 60 seconds of activity within each of these apps on the Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5.Įven though Hu’s team studied only Android apps and phones, their findings might have similar implications for Apple phones, starting with the iPhone X.
The study looked at six of the most-downloaded apps on Google Play: Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube and Calculator. “But now we’re able to give developers the tools they need to give users more energy-efficient apps.”īased on their findings using these tools they built, the researchers clarify the facts about the effects of dark mode on battery life and recommend ways that users can already take better advantage of the feature’s power savings. “When the industry rushed to adopt dark mode, it didn’t have the tools yet to accurately measure power draw by the pixels,” said Charlie Hu, Purdue’s Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. That doesn’t mean that dark mode can’t be helpful, though. When Android and Apple operating system updates started giving users the option to put their smartphones in dark mode, the feature showed potential for saving the battery life of newer phones with screens that allow darker-colored pixels to use less power than lighter-colored pixels.īut dark mode is unlikely to make a big difference to battery life with the way that most people use their phones on a daily basis, says a new study by Purdue University researchers.
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