Dark mode, one of the most popular battery saving tips on devices, might not actually save your battery.
In recent years, a host of different apps, website and devices have introduced dark mode, which flips the colours so that they have white text on a dark background rather than the opposite.
That has been marketed in a variety of ways: partly for its aesthetics, but also because it saves battery by requiring devices to use less light on their screens. Using dark mode is often promoted as a simple way of reducing power usage and potentially prolonging the battery time on a device.
However, new research from the BBC suggests that people instead tend to turn the brightness up on their device to offset the darker display – negating those energy savings, and in fact potentially using more battery.
In the work, BBC researchers showed people the BBC Sounds website in both dark and light mode and asked people to turn the brightness up until they were comfortable. They found that 80 per cent of users turned the brightness up significantly more in the dark mode version.
The researchers warned that it did not mean that there was nothing to be done, either for those looking to reduce their cost to the climate or just keep their battery running for longer. Keeping the brightness down still uses less energy, for instance.
A paper describing the findings also notes that the work was done using a more traditional LCD display. Part of the recent popularity of dark mode has come with the advent and broad adoption of OLED displays, which are able to show blacks while using less energy.
