Today Google revealed a bit of information on how your smartphone spends its battery life. They did this at this week’s Android Dev Summit, speaking to developers about what they can do in their apps to avoid consuming massive amounts of battery life. But this isn’t just about that. This is about the biggest factor in battery consumption: screen brightness! And not only that, but screen color, too!
The information we’re looking at today comes from Google during a presentation at the 2018 Android Dev Summit. That’s different from Google I/O, for some reason – that’s all about Android too, but also about Chrome, and other stuff. This was all about Android, this week, and the battery time that’s most precious to all users. Mobile battery time, in smartphones, the devices most people use the most major amount of their time.
The first and most obvious piece of information Google shared was on screen brightness and power. This should be fairly obvious – more brightness means quicker power draw. They discovered that it’s not always perfectly linear – but it’s so close to linear that it might as well have been a straight line, one for one.
Next they shared some information on their studies which, as you’ll see, weren’t done with the most recent hardware we have available today. They did this study with the first Google Pixel. The differences between the first Pixel and the rest are irrelevant here. What’s important is the difference between power draw on max brightness between normal mode and “Night Mode.” Not every smartphone makes use of such a feature.
Google also studied color. The color shown on a display really, truly affects how much power is drawn from the battery of the phone. As you’ll see in the chart here, each color has a different amount of draw on its device’s battery.