Bright wallpaper battery drain has been popular on discussion forums. If you're just saying glossy wallpapers consume more battery than dark ones, you're partially right. This is so because there are other things at stake when we are talking about a wallpaper sacrificing your phone's battery. The real answer to wallpaper battery drain is slightly more complicated.
The screen of your smartphone is one of the most power consuming components of the device. Different phones have different screens with different refresh rates and resolutions. Whether or not a wallpaper causes battery drain depends on your phone's display and usage.
The Legend Of Wallpaper Battery Drain
Yes, a lighter wallpaper apparently takes more juice when the screen is on. But wait, it's not just the wallpaper, but the display as well. Smartphones have two types of screens, OLED and LCD. A liquid crystal display or LCD panel is a more traditional display that uses a lot more battery. Then we have the organic light emitting diode or the OLED screen. OLEDs are energy efficient and produce sharper blacks.
Before we dive any further, let's talk briefly about how screens work. The basics are pretty straightforward. The pixels on the back of the panel light up in red, green, and blue to make screen content visible to you. With more brightness / lighting, you lose more battery. Simply put, if your phone has a light background, it will consume more battery as the wallpaper would require constant lighting to display.
LCD panels and battery drains
Speaking of conventional LCD panels, they were even present in last year's iPhone lineup. An LCD screen consumes more battery because it has multiple layers that require you to light up the entire screen. This is the reason why you should not download an always-on display app on a phone with an LCD screen. So having a darker wallpaper probably won't save you a lot of battery if you're using an LCD screen.
Having said that, LCD screens are still power hungry if you use your phone at higher brightness settings. It's a simple balance. The decrease in battery power is proportional to the increase in brightness, regardless of the screens you use.
OLED and battery drain
People at XDA found that at maximum brightness, default wallpapers consumed 5% battery in 15 minutes, while pure black wallpapers consumed 3%. Another Reddit user found that white wallpaper used up 10% of the battery in an hour, and black wallpaper only used 3% of power in an hour. These results are over 3 to 5 years old and batteries and screens have come a long way from there. However, it is still a fact that a brighter wallpaper and higher brightness will drain your phone faster on an AMOLED display.
If you're using a recent Android phone, whether it's a Samsung, Pixel, or OnePlus device, there's a good chance you're running an OLED display. There is a class of OLED panels called AMOLED or Active Matrix OLED displays that are found on most devices. Your phone will be more energy efficient if it has an AMOLED display. The story is similar in the case of the other type called POLED (Plastic Light Emitting Diode) which was used on Google Pixel devices.
This is so because AMOLED panels allow the device to send energy only to the pixels that need to be lit. So if your phone is asleep and you have a screen that's always on, it isn't consuming as much battery as only part of the screen is on.
Dark mode to the rescue
It takes more power to light up the screen, so it will save power if you used dark mode instead. If you have used a Samsung phone, you must have noticed how it goes into dark mode when you turn on power saving mode. This is so because dark mode allows the phone to light up less items on the screen, which saves more power. So if you keep your phone in dark mode all the time, chances are you are saving precious percentage points on your battery.
This is so because dark mode blackens out app backgrounds, menus, and basically the entire interface of your phone. That said, there are fewer pixels that light up in dark mode, which saves more battery. So if you are worried about glossy wallpaper battery drain, go for good dark wallpaper and system wide dark mode.
Now if you want to switch to the dark side, there are a few apps that I recommend. You can find good black wallpapers on 4K Amoled Wallpapers - Black application, Dark Wallpapers in the Play Store. If you are looking for something simpler, I suggest you go for the Pitch Black Wallpaper.
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