Google confirms dark mode on Android phones saves battery life

Hollis Johnson/Business
Insider

• Google
  showcased how the “dark mode” option on mobile operating
  systems and apps uses less power and drains battery less
  quickly. 
• The dark mode option changes the primary color theme of an
  app to the color black.
• The company also admitted that it had made a mistake in
  encouraging app developers to use the color white as the main
  color for their apps due to its negative effects on battery
  life. 

Dark mode saves lives. Battery lives, that is.

Google backed up the battery life benefits of “dark mode” on
operating systems and apps in a presentation during
the company’s Android Dev Summit on Thursday.

Dark mode is an option that changes the overall color theme of an
operating system or app to the color black. It’s long been
associated with better battery life on devices, especially mobile
devices. Nevertheless, the benefits of dark mode are now
officially endorsed by Google, one of the most influential tech
companies in the world.

In one piece of data, Google showed how dark mode can use 43%
less power at full brightness than “normal mode” in the YouTube
app, which uses a lot of white. 

Google

Funnily enough, Google acknowledged that it had made a mistake in
encouraging app developers to use the color white for their apps,
including Google’s own apps. Unfortunately, it’s led to an
inconsistent experience on mobile devices. You can turn on dark
mode for the Android operating system and various apps that offer
dark mode, but other apps that don’t offer dark mode will use
color white as the main color theme. 

The battery-saving effects of dark modes are also more apparent
on OLED displays, which most top smartphones use these days,
compared to more traditional LCD displays. OLED displays don’t
shine their pixels when displaying the color black. In essence,
pixels displaying the color black are actually turned off and are
using very little power — if any. LCD displays, on the
other hand, have a backlight that’s always shining, even when
displaying the color black. 

Battery life is certainly a major reason for every operating
system and app developer to offer dark mode. But for me, it’s
mostly about comfort. It’s an incredibly jarring experience to
use apps in dark mode, only to switch to an app without dark mode
and get suddenly blasted with white light. It’s especially
noticeable when using mobile devices in dark environments. 

Perhaps we’ll see more apps getting the dark mode option in the
near future. I’m especially rooting for website developers to
give the option to give their websites a dark mode, too.