Myth Busted | Dark Mode doesn't lengthen your smartphone's battery life after all

There has been a long held belief among users that Dark Mode is actually better for your phone's battery life. Researchers at Purdue University think otherwise.

In a test conducted by the University (via XDA Developers), researchers used four phones with OLED screens (thought to benefit the most from dark mode) namely - Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5. The test involved using six different applications on Android - Calendar, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Phone and YouTube - and testing the power draw under load for sixty seconds. The tests were conducted using a utility of tools built specifically for this purpose.

The results were not what you would expect. At around 30 percent to 40 percent brightness, which is where most phones stay by default, the benefits of Dark Mode were marginal. Only 3 percent to 9 percent.

The big gains could only be seen with the brightness set 100 percent where turning on Dark Mode gives you savings of about 47 percent.

Let's be real though, no one is going to walk around with a phone at 100 percent brightness, most of us prefer to set the brightness at around 50 percent and even more, simply let the phone do the heavy lifting using auto-brightness, the feature that dynamically adjusts the screen brightness to match your surroundings.

In those cases, using Dark Mode wasn't very beneficial as per the study. We would imagine this would be worse on LCD screens that don't individually light up pixels the way OLED does.