Does Dark Mode Improve Your Smartphone’s Battery Life?
Dark mode is the ability to switch from a light-themed color scheme (with a lot of white) to a predominantly black or dark gray theme. It has been available on certain applications for a few years now (for example, Twitter), and it’s now possible to use it more broadly on the latest versions of iOS and Android.
The Benefits of Dark Mode
Apart from offering a change in appearance on your smartphone, dark mode is less bright and therefore less straining on your eyes.
Additionally, since a large majority of us check our smartphones before bedtime, and we know that blue light emission in low light has detrimental effects on our vision and sleep quality, dark mode can help reduce these effects by decreasing blue light emission.
What About Battery Life?
In several articles, it’s also mentioned that enabling dark mode can improve your smartphone’s battery life since dark colors reduce the screen’s power consumption. However, in reality, this isn’t always true.
To understand why it’s not always true, we need to look at the screen technologies used in smartphones. Today, the majority of screens use LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), which requires a constant backlight to produce colors.
In contrast, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology doesn’t require a backlight because each pixel emits light. The darker a pixel, the less energy it consumes.
In summary, if you have a smartphone with an LCD screen, dark mode won’t have any impact on your battery life. However, if you have an OLED screen, dark mode can save you approximately 30% of energy.
Please note that you’ll need a relatively high-end phone like an iPhone X, XS, or 11 Pro on iOS or a Samsung Galaxy or Pixel 3 on Android to benefit from an OLED screen.
Supporting Dark Mode in an Application
By default, an application that doesn’t support dark mode won’t be affected by the system-level dark mode activation.
To add dark mode support to an application, Apple and Google offer similar approaches:
- Automatic dark mode generation: The simplest method, as the system itself tries to adapt the color palette, though the results may vary depending on the colors used and how they are managed. This approach may not handle assets like bitmap images that might not be suitable for a dark background.
- Manual management of a dark theme: This method allows you to make all the necessary adjustments to support dark mode.
Lastly, since dark mode support is becoming the norm, it’s essential to plan for it when developing a new application. This includes visual design (creating appropriate assets for both light and dark modes) and technical design.
En conclusion…
Dark mode is trendy and has the added benefit of being easier on your eyes.
While it may not directly increase your battery life unless you have a specific type of phone, its system-level support makes it a feature that is likely to become a standard in the near future.
Therefore, it’s essential to consider supporting dark mode in your applications right from the start.
