Dark mode doesn't really help save mobile's battery life, says new study

For a long we have been told by mobile handset-makers that the introduction of dark mode will save a lot of battery life. Their logical point was derived from the assumption that the phone's screen with a dark background will ensure there is less consumption of power compared to the bright white or vividly coloured themes.

But, a new study by researchers at Purdue University has shown that the dark or the bright light background of a phone's screen doesn't have any discernible impact on the battery life.

They conducted an experiment on OLED displays of Moto Z3, Pixel 2, Pixel 4, and Pixel 5 with dark and normal mode. They tested commonly used apps--Calendar, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Phone, and YouTube-- to get a reading on how much the battery drained.

To everyone's surprise, the result showed there was a marginally low difference of just three to nine percent between a normal and dark mode in terms of power consumption. It should be noted that this result is based normal brightness of a phone, which is usually around 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the maximum capability of the screen.

Usually, phone manufacturers integrate ambient light sensors with the display to gauge the surrounding environment's light condition and optimises the screen's brightness accordingly.

However, when the display brightness was maxed out to 100%, there was a very big difference of around 39 per cent and 47 per cent. So, if you turn on the dark mode in this scenario, it will certainly help extend the battery life for the day.

Having noted that, most users never keep their phone screen's brightness to 100 per cent at all times.

For now, mobile users have been advised to just switch on an adaptive display feature that will automatically adjust the brightness according to the surrounding environment. If there is a dire need of saving battery life, particularly those who don't have a power bank and stay far from a proper power source can bet on the device's power-saving feature, which will certainly boost the battery life.

“When the industry rushed to adopt dark mode, it didn’t have the tools yet to accurately measure power draw by the pixels (unit of the display). But now we’re able to give developers the tools they need to give users more energy-efficient apps,” said Charlie Hu, Purdue’s Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The new tool Android Battery+, developed by Hu's team is expected to become available to platform vendors and app developers in the coming year.

This will help developers to get more accurate statistics related to the app's power consumption and help them tweak the app's settings to control battery usage during active and inactive states. Thereby leading to the overall battery life of the phones.

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