Making your smartphone interface darker may not retain battery power.
Despite long-term beliefs that “dark mode” extends the lifespan of the battery-especially on telephones equipped with powerful OLED screens-has a new BBC study shown that most users compensate by pushing their brightness levels higher, so that all energy kings effectively be denied.
According to the research, 80 percent of the participants who have changed their phones to a dark background and then adjusted the brightness, causing them to deduct their batteries at a faster speed. On the other hand, those who opted for standard “light mode” were less likely to play with screen settings, which means that the original lower brightness was maintained.
This dynamic drives contrary to earlier lab-based findings, including a Purdue University study from 2021 that shows phones set on dark mode, use 42 percent less power under full brightness conditions. Googleing engineers also discovered a potential power reduction of up to 63 percent for OLED displays in dark mode. However, those tests have not taken into account the behavior of real users.
Zak Datson, an engineer at the BBC’s Research & Development Team, said that simple sustainability tips are not always able to look into practice. “Some of the most common recommendations are overly simplistic,” he noticed. “In the case of dark mode, some people ultimately use more energy.”
The test of the BBC underlines that the most certain way to extend the battery life is to reduce the brightness of the screen. Lowering the brightness can considerably halve energy consumption compared to a telephone that is stored at maximum settings.
The study is part of the BBC’s broader sustainability campaign, because the corporation wants to lower overall CO2 emissions by 90 percent by 2050. Under media-related carbon sources, the production of devices such as televisions and smartphones is as an important contribution, during film production, traveling is usually the biggest emitter of carbon.