Smartphone is fast adopting dark mode as it saviour for battery life. Be it Android or iOS more and more apps offering the choice to users for Dark Mode. A new study questions use of dark mode as an effective measure of reducing battery drain.
A team from Purdue University have develop new tools to measure the effects of a dark mode on a smartphone’s battery.
The development now helps effectively monitor the battery drain cause by lighter colours on the screen as a dark mode.
Dark mode is unlikely to impact the battery life of a smartphone significantly.
It does use less battery than a regular light-coloured theme, the difference is unlikely to be noticeable with the way that most people use their phones on a daily basis.
Dark Mode on an OLED smartphone is likely to save only 3% to 9% of power as compared to a regular mode.
Phone’s use at 30% to 50% of brightness, usually the range follow by an auto-brightness setting.
The new study says that these battery gains can be significantly higher at 100% brightness of the display.
A smartphone can save about 39% to 47% of battery power at peak brightness by operating on dark mode.
This is close to an additional half of the battery life deliver in one charge cycle.
It found that the dark mode can significantly save battery life in peak brightness usually by smartphone users in outdoor conditions under sunlight.
Note that these gains were found to exist on OLED screens due to the lack of backlight as found on the LCD (liquid crystal display) screens.
OLEDs draw less power when displaying dark-coloured pixels.
Dark Mode Research
Scientists from Purdue University tested six of the most downloaded apps on Google Play which includes Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube and Calculator.
These apps were test on dark mode for 60 seconds of activity on smartphones, including Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5.
Even the tests were conduct on Android apps and phones scientists say that the findings are likely to hold true for iPhones with OLED screens as well.
Research team created new power modeling technology for the test which is now pending patent.
The new tool is able to determine the power draw of OLED phone displays more accurately than the existing techniques.
That is because the new tool measures the effects of a dark mode on battery life with a feature that is amiss in Android’s in-built feature as of now.
It is expected to be available to platform vendors and app developers as Android Battery+ in the coming year.
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