Dark mode can improve the battery life of your smartphone, but it has a catch

Dark mode can increase battery life on smartphones with OLED displays, at least that’s what has been said in the smartphone world for several years. However, scientists at Purdue University have found that turning on the dark mode does not improve endurance as much as we thought. The XDA Developers portal informed about the topic.

Until now, it has not been possible to determine how much better the dark mode is in terms of battery consumption

At a time when the dark mode was popularizing and began to be introduced on a large scale, there were still no tools that could effectively measure the consumption of individual pixels on the display. It was therefore not possible to determine exactly what percentage the dark regime can improve consumption and, if so, not at all.

So before the study began, the researchers developed a special device that can accurately record the consumption of individual pixels. They then left one of the six selected applications (Calculator, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google News, Google YouTube Phone) running for 60 seconds. The applications were tested on Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 devices, which of course have OLED displays.

The brightness level also plays a big role

It turned out that if the brightness level was set to about 30% -50%, the difference in consumption between dark and light mode was only 3-9%. On the contrary, the difference was up to 47% at maximum brightness.

The study also showed other interesting findings, such as that Google News consumes the same amount of power in light mode at 20% brightness as in dark mode at 50% brightness. However, it does not matter whether the applications in dark mode have a pure black background or only dark gray. According to the study, a pure black background is only slightly better.

Details on battery consumption in Android do not take dark mode into account

The researchers also said that the details of battery consumption in Android settings do not take dark mode correctly into account. They have therefore developed a tool called “Android Battery +”, which they want to make publicly available to developers and also add its features to the AOSP (Android Open Source Project).