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Dark theme is not a panacea: even on OLED screens, dark mode does not help much to extend battery life

In recent years, smartphone makers have been actively promoting the dark theme on smartphones as a way to extend the battery life of their devices.

Dark theme is not a panacea: even on OLED screens, dark mode does not help much to extend battery life

In reality, dark mode doesn’t really affect battery life much, given the way most people use their phones in their daily lives, new research from Purdue University has shown.

Of course, this is not to say that the dark theme is useless in terms of extending autonomy. However, this leads to noticeable results only if certain conditions are met, even for smartphones with OLED screens.

Dark mode has a significant impact only when the user switches from the standard light interface to dark with a brightness close to 100%. However, in most cases, the average brightness is kept at the level of 30-50%. In this case, the dark mode allows you to get a runtime increase of only 3-9%. And the user is unlikely to feel the positive effect in terms of increased runtime.

Dark theme is not a panacea: even on OLED screens, dark mode does not help much to extend battery life

It is unlikely that many of us are constantly “cranking” the brightness to the maximum level on a constant basis. Thus, one cannot count on a tangible increase in autonomy. The researchers concluded that marketers are still quite cunning and exaggerate the effect of using dark theme on device autonomy.

One researcher explained:

When the industry rushed to dark mode, there were no tools to accurately measure the power consumption of screen pixels. But now we can provide developers with the tools they need to create more energy efficient applications. ”

The study looked at the six most downloaded apps on Google Play: Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube, and Calculator. Researchers analyzed how Dark Mode affects 60 seconds of activity in each of these apps on Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4, and Pixel 5.

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